reedom was invisible
in 1990. Violence
wasn’t.
Thousands of students
in Delhi were on the
streets, not in classrooms
and canteens. They
went on a rampage
and attempted selfimmolation. They were
protesting against
then prime minister
V.P. Singh’s decision to
revive the 10-year-old
Mandal Commission
report to enforce new
government employment
opportunities and
reservation for backward
Mobs for merit: Students protesting caste reservations in Delhi in 1990.
classes. We want
opportunities based on
merit, they demanded. It was as if
decade and the “free” globalized Indian
thousands of years of our collective history
became a reality. The arts reflected the
as a nation, where caste oppression has
dichotomies of a new Indian society, wedged
been not only acceptable but validated,
between tradition and modernity.
became redundant. It was a violent case for
It was a character-altering decade for
individual merit by the nation’s young.
independent India, and yet the most
Two years later, Hindu goons
unchronicled. Works of contemporary history
congregated at Ayodhya, the mythical
are scarce in our country. Ramachandra
birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, and
Guha’s India after Gandhi ends with the
Emergency. Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India
destroyed a mosque, claiming it was the
predominantly traces late colonial and early
seat of a Ram temple. On that spot, a
post-independence Indian history. Gurcharan
Muslim mosque had stood since the 16th
Das’ India Unbound, on the other hand, is a
century. A secular nation is bound to be
one-sided narrative, an unequivocal paean to
slurred forever after a day like this.
liberalized India.
As a nation, every aspect of our lives had
So the 1990s remain largely unexamined.
been under government control for decades
Was economic freedom a panacea for all ills?
before 1990. When, between these two
How does an open capitalist economy retain
momentous episodes in our history, prime
the principles of a welfare state?
minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and his finance
It has been 20 years since globalization
minister Manmohan Singh decided to liberate
opened our horizons. In this special
the Indian economy from overwhelming
Independence Day issue of Lounge, we revisit
government control, new kinds of freedom
this momentous decade to understand its
were upon us: freedom to earn money and
merits, its chaos and what we could not see
comfort, freedom for growth and power to
then. Enjoy reading.
define ourselves primarily as individuals and
consumers. Ideological umbrellas began
Sanjukta Sharma
disappearing fast from our lives.
Issue editor
Economic reforms continued through the

the 1980s list
Globalization, thank you for malls,
flyovers, McDonald’s and satellite
television. But sometimes we get
misty-eyed about the imperfect
1970s and 1980s. Here’s a list of
what we miss:

Doordarshan

They probably didn’t intend it
that way, but Doordarshan (DD)
might just have saved an entire
generation from the surge of obesity, juvenile diabetes and weak
eyesight. With one children’s
programme on Sundays, Chitrahaar twice a week and the Sunday movie, there was no way a
child in the DD era could spend
more than a couple of hours a
week in front of the TV.
The practice also of community TV-watching—albeit unwittingly—gave the country a collective consciousness. What could
be a greater leveller than a message that would often bring the
country to a standstill: an
unmoving image of paper flowers, neatly arranged on a carpet,
reading “Rukawat ke liye khed
hai” (sorry for the interruption).

one scene, intrepid Hawa
Hawai in another, Sridevi made
us empathize with an anthropomorphic snake, a naagin, out to
avenge her partner’s death, and
she danced “Jumping Jack” Jeetendra out of breath in songs
like Nainon mein sapna. What
we miss is her comic timing—maybe the stressful postliberalization, size-zero diet
does not allow women actors to
be funny any more.

Radio
The surfeit of TV channels also
ended the dependence on radio.
Unlike this year’s cricket World

Cup, the 1983 win is an audio
memory for most Indians. Most
middle-class India didn’t have
TV sets. What we had was the
radio and its antenna to cling to,
for middle-of-the-night,
scratchy commentary from the
West Indies, for music with
Ameen Sayani’s Binaca/Cibaca
Geet Mala.

Premier Padmini
The Premier Padmini—or Fiat,
as it was called—was the perfect metaphor for the 1980s.
The right balancing act on
Indian roads between the lumbering-but-imperious Ambassador and the shiny-happy
Maruti 800, it personified an
age of austerity.

VCP and VCR
One of the unspoken tenets of
the age was that someone with a
VCR, a VHS player that could
also record, automatically
ascended to the higher end of
the social spectrum than
someone with just a VHS
player, or VCP.

Typewriters

Borrowing

With nationalized banks and
other relic-loving institutions
having long crossed over to
the bright side, the typewriter’s time was up. Yet
we got a little nostalgic a
few months ago when the
last typewriter company,
Mumbai-based Godrej and
Boyce, closed its factory. The
rhythmic click-clack of the
typewriter is not coming back.

This being the age of consumerism, we now believe in
buying. India in the 1970s
and 1980s was big on borrowing. A bowl of sugar
from the neighbour, an
hour’s television during a
crucial match. These sugar
bowls and snatches of TV
time also became vehicles
of camaraderie between
neighbours and almoststrangers.

Pavitra Jayaraman’s “We have no branches”, 6 August,
was enjoyable. The points she made, and the examples,
were relevant. Though I’ve stayed in Mumbai most of my
life, the line that caught my attention was the chief
minister’s (R. Gundu Rao’s) response to ornithologist M.B.
Krishna’s letter about the Lalbagh lake—Krishna is quoted
as saying “my grievance had been sent to the director of
horticulture, who met me, consulted with experts, and the
whole idea was cancelled”.
Keep up the good job.
PUSHPENDRA PANDYA

Saturday, August 6, 2011

LOUNGE
THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

THE NEW OLD DELHI
As New Delhi turns 100, Shahjahan’s Walled City is
also embracing change. We visited a joint family and
its neighbourhood to feel the new pulse >Pages 10­12

BUSINESS LOUNGE
WITH ACUMEN
FUND’S JACQUELINE
NOVOGRATZ >Page 8

SMARTPHONE
THINKING ON A
DESKTOP

OS X Lion is a wily beast, but it
recognizes that things have been wrong
for too long with desktops >Page 7

‘JUST A WAY TO
SHUT UP SOCIETY’
As experts debate their ‘marriage’, two
women get protection from a Gurgaon
court against prejudices and death
threats >Page 9

MODERNITY AND
MEGA CITIES

Architect Rahul Mehrotra on his new
book, how ‘impatient capital’ shapes
a city’s skyline, and the relevance of
Gandhian ideas of space >Page 16

An old­style
house at Chitli
Qabar Chowk in
Old Delhi.

LUXURY CULT

THE BEAUTY OF DRAVIDIAN CRICKET

Vol. 5 No. 32

RADHA CHADHA

MCQUEEN’S ART
OF CONTRASTS

REPLY TO ALL

AAKAR PATEL

WE OWE THE ‘PAV
BHAJI’ TO AMERICA

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

WHY YOU WILL
LEARN ON THE JOB

I
S
W
Was Rohit Brijnath’s “The beauty of waiting in Test cricket”,
30 July, the piece of cricket writing I had been WAITING to
read? As I read his column, I realized that, indeed, this is
the kind of cricket article I have always wanted to read—articles by a cricket writer with an
understanding of a cricketer’s psyche and mindset. Brijnath’s piece showed an understanding of a
man whose achievements, commitment and single­minded dedication have never really been
celebrated. Rahul Dravid is as precious as any in world cricket today, but he doesn’t shine as much
because he likes to keep away from the glare of publicity. He does not throw tantrums or indulge in
antics that would be detrimental to the game, the spirit of which he holds sacrosanct, and which he
embodies to the fullest. Sincere thanks to Brijnath and more power to his pen.
SHIRISH WAGHMODE
am not the only lady gaga over
McQueen—there are thousands of people
in the queue, waiting an average of 2 hours
to enter the spectacular retrospective
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, which is in
its last week at The Metropolitan Museum of
Art (Met) in New York. Its 4 May opening
pulled a crowd of 5,100, the highest first-day
traffic the Met has had since the Vincent van
Gogh show in 2005. Nearly half a million
visitors have already seen... >Page 4

nack food represents a higher form of
civilization. We can trace the ascent of man
through his diet, from gulped mouthfuls to
nibbled morsels. The peasant eats three meals, and
often only two, lunch and an early supper. His day is
structured around these sittings, and for him eating
is purely for nourishment. Evidence of this is before
me every day. My lunch is always thick bajra roti,
one lightly cooked green, thin chhaas and a paste of
garlic and red chillies. The food of my fathers. It is
the trader who has introduced... >Page 5

hat do you know, they say to you.
Wait till the pain starts. Wait till the
baby wakes up, starts toddling,
demands an iPad. Wait till the brat starts school,
the angel turns 12. Wait till they fall in love…and
then you’ll know. I don’t know what the grand
truths are. I do know that everyday life with
children needs to be constructed every day.
Bruises kissed, roads crossed, stories narrated,
albums uploaded, excuses made and work done.
So how does one do it all? >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY

FASTING, FEASTING

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: ROBERT NICKELSBERG/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

IN A SPECIAL EDITION OF THE

LOUNGE PODCAST
Mint’s executive editor Niranjan Rajadhyaksha
tells us why it takes “utter cussedness to
deny the obvious achievements of greater
economic freedom”. And in culture, Sanjukta
Sharma picks five movies from the 1990s that
changed Indian film history.

www.livemint.com/loungepodcast

L4

LOUNGE
INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PUBLIC EYE
SUNIL KHILNANI

after 20 years,
we can’t go it alone

j
World view: India’s par­
ticipation at the World
Economic Forum in
Davos is a step towards
exposing ourselves to the
international economy.

“Jharkhand boy shakes the world”
declared Indian headlines last
week—and no, they were not
referring to the captain of our
pulverized cricket team, but to
the Ranchi-born Deven Sharma,
the giant-thumping head of
Standard & Poor’s, which had just
delivered its stinging assessment
of the quality of America’s debt.
Lines of causality were, of course,
being jumbled a little here by
excitable copywriters. The flap of
the butterfly’s wing does not
actually cause the tsunami. Still,
there has been some reason for
Indians to feel self-congratulatory
in these topsy-turvy weeks.
Topsy-turvy indeed: a moment
when China scolds the US for its
excessive social spending, and
raises concerns about whether
London is up to holding the
Olympics; when the UK devolves
into looting and riot; when debt
crises send markets into panic;
when the machinery of
government is paralysed. The
current situation in Europe and
the US makes India look like
stability itself.
India may not be quite the
Chinese scold to America’s woes,
but it is hoping hard to stay
insulated from the worst of the
turmoil in the US and Europe.
The country’s economic policy
managers and spin doctors have
been stressing that the Indian
economy remains largely driven
by internal factors, that India
remains in a better position than
most to manage the
uncertainties ahead.
Just 20 years ago, it was our
own economy that was plunged
into turmoil. It was India that
seemed poised to default on its
obligations—our government had
to Fedex almost 50 tonnes of
Reserve Bank of India gold out of
the country to reassure creditors.
We came out of that crisis
smelling of roses—and set to
work creating a mythology. In
retrospect, we decided there was
some special Indian magic which
got us out of the special Indian
mess we had created.

Certainly, Indian
entrepreneurship and
inventiveness, in combination
with astute management of the
economy, played a central part in
the remarkable economic
expansion since 1991. This
succeeded in planting a
necessary self-belief and
optimism across Indian
society—a vital, positive force in
shaping the horizon of possibility.
But the fact is that our own
growth story over the past two
decades coincided, until recently,
with an unusually clement global
climate. India was not the only
success story of the 1990s.
Globalization in general was
working well, fostering a period of
exceptional sustained growth in
the global economy, driven by the
US. We were among the main
beneficiaries. But we weren’t
alone among nations in assuming
that such a mild, welcoming
international economy would be
a permanent climate—into which
we had merely to transplant
ourselves, and then watch
ourselves grow.
Our good fortune has
nourished a kind of insouciance
among both our business and
political elites. Among the
Indian business elites, a sense
took hold that they would be
able to manage, grow and
expand, despite the mess of our
politics. Because they could look
and reach outwards, the
domestic dysfunctions of India’s
politics and institutions could
be surmounted.
Among the political elites, a
different view spread: that they
could continue to pursue their
own partisan and personal
interests, make their deals and
double-cuts, and the economic
goose would still continue to lay
golden eggs.
The outcome was a distinctive,
divided attitude that has come to
mark our public life. A deep
cynicism about politics washes
over everything, yet somehow it
has managed not to corrode a
happy confidence, even a bit of a

swagger, about economics. When
it comes to economics, we’ve
become, like our cricketers, a little
Australian. Yet the unravelling of
the 1990s global economic
dispensation has underlined just
how contingent it has been.
We’ve told ourselves that we
have managed our international
exposure wisely. We comfort
ourself that we’ve remained
insulated from some of the more
random currents that feed and
confuse global flows of opinion
and capital. And these are not
false comforts. For there are
indeed structural elements
internal to our country—
demography, savings and
investment rates—that could
enable India to sustain high levels
of growth for some time to come.
But if the subtext is that, 20
years after 1991, we can manage
by going it alone, we’re bumping
into the territory of Chekhov’s
vital lie. We have to see our future
squarely in relation to the world.
Our growth will depend on more
exposure to the international
economy—on putting ourselves
further and deeper into the world.
For some foreseeable time—at
least the next 20 years—that
means positioning ourselves in a
world and in a global economy
that is likely to be steeped in
uncertainty. Already wealthy
states are likely to become
increasingly defensive as their
people age, their growth stutters
and their payouts mount. And
more and more, large,
fast-growing states will feel
entitled to ignore existing norms
and to make up rules as they go
along. This unruly global
economy will have no
particularly favourable
dispensation towards us.
Seen from this perspective, to
think of economic reforms simply
in domestic terms—as a taking
forward of the internal economic
reforms set in motion two
decades ago—is far too limited.
To sustain India’s economic
growth will require working with
a more ambitious and expansive

agenda. The reformist economic
imagination will need to do more
than encompass a wish-list of
further domestic reforms,
important as they undoubtedly
are. It will also need to think
about strategic engagement with
the global economy, in all its
tangled, causally elusive,
confounding ways. It will need to
embrace its structures, its
primary actors, and its
generalized uncertainty.
While we will continue to feel
the effects of global economic
trends, it is also now the case that
we are actors within it—and upon
it. We’re no longer free-riders.
Instead, we’ll have to figure out
how we can help make the world
economy more stable, and how
we can turn its idiosyncrasies to
our advantage. This will require
us to think as much in political as
in economic terms.
Here, the deep, historically
sanctioned split between our
political and economic
imaginations is a disabling
handicap. Merchant and prince,
financier and king, have always
kept a proud imaginative distance
from one another across the long
sweep of our history—a
segregation of wealth and power
that marks us out from the
societies of the West, as it does
from those of China and Japan.
Now, we shall have to find ways
to bring these two classes closer
in outlook, and in ways that are
more constructive for our
national project than the merely
mutual corruption that now links
them.
Reconstituting our economy,
making it fit for toughening global
conditions, will need political
leaders and market entrepreneurs
to put their heads together: to
devise a calculus of risk and
opportunity for India as a whole.
This sounds like a tall order,
given the increasing
fragmentation and
particularization of our society, as
all pursue self-defined interests
with little connection to a
national vision. But if we don’t

manage it, if we don’t see the
economy in strategic as opposed
to selfish terms, we’ll remain an
underachieved nation.
A more strategic conception of
our reform agenda for the next 20
years would recognize several
pressing matters. In the first
instance, it’s apparent that the
world’s rich economies will
increasingly become defensive. It
will be up to us to press for an
open global order: open not only
for the movement of capital and
goods, but also of people—which
in many ways is our richest
resource (there are many, many
more Jharkhand boys waiting to
flutter their wings).
A more strategic economic
conception will mean figuring
how to leverage our economic
engagements so that they yield
access to the technologies and
investments that we need—and
that presupposes that we have
some coherent assessment of,
and agreement about, what these
needs might actually be. A more
strategic conception will also
require more determinate views
about future global currency
regimes and how to maximize
our interests. And a more
strategic conception would also
mean working more actively to
influence and shape the character
of international financial
organizations.
These are tasks for government
brains, no doubt; but, given
today’s extremely complicated
division of economic knowledge
and expertise, private capital’s
finest minds must work with
policymakers. To negotiate a
more complex economic future,
old Indian dichotomies need to
be put aside, for good.
Sunil Khilnani is the author of
The Idea of India.
Write to lounge@livemint.com
www.livemint.com
Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at
www.livemint.com/sunil­khilnani
TOMOHIRO OHSUMI/BLOOMBERG

Sports writers don’t cry. Maybe
cynicism clogs our tear ducts.
We’re supposed to be
hard-nosed, Damon
Runyon-worshipping creatures,
drinking cheap whisky and
holding dying cigarettes to
complete the cliché. Except,
some days, sport turns you
inside out, it takes a different
grip on the throat and
everything goes haywire.
Goddam, Leander Paes, I say.
Covering the sporting 1990s
was often like a tired
investigation into mediocrity.
But I admired athletes because
they fought hardship and
handicap. I’d go to training
grounds and listen to the music
of athletes training for major
games, the wrestlers with their
grunting rap, the boxers with
their grim percussion on bags.
Then I’d see them touch official
feet and grimace.
Pictures invaded our home, of
Pete Sampras’ barn-door
shoulders and Ronaldo’s
turbine-like thighs. Sport was too
fast, professional, muscular for
India, and you could smell fear
on many Indian athletes. But
Sachin Tendulkar didn’t have it,
Viswanathan Anand didn’t feel it
and Leander couldn’t spell it.
But he should have felt
inferior. He didn’t have
Tendulkar’s concentrated
technique nor Anand’s fertile
mind. They were extraordinary
players, Leander wasn’t.
Average height. Average game,
for volley aside, which was akin
to a Marvin Hagler jab, his
technique arrived from a
defective tennis factory.
But he was fast, twitching on
court as if an invisible God was
electrocuting him. And he
owned this inner voice, which
we couldn’t hear but whose
primeval desire we could see
in his play, a voice that
convinced him he was a sort of
tennis Rocky from a Calcutta
bylane. But only when he
played for India.
He was naturally competitive
and we’d play table tennis,

carom, golf and he wouldn’t give
a bloody inch. It didn’t show
enough on tour, but put him in
a Davis Cup, an Asian Games,
and his tap of adrenalin opened.
It wasn’t simply patriotism, it
was an answering to the
theatrical hero within, he was a
Las Vegas entertainer in search
of a crowd. Give him one, he’ll
give you a show.
So there we are, the Atlanta
Olympics. He’s 23. Never won a
round in a Grand Slam singles
event. Ranked No. 126 or
thereabouts. I’m not even
watching him. But, at different
venues, the hockey, the athletics,
news leaks in from the tennis
centre. The kid won again. He
beats Richey Reneberg, world
No. 20, beats Nicolas Pereira,
world No. 74, beats Thomas
Enqvist, world No. 10. We
know he thinks rankings are
only to be disrespected, but
this is ridiculous.
I start making the trek to the
tennis centre because it’s

beginning. The pressure.
Forty-four years is how long
India hasn’t won an individual
Olympic medal, 44 years which
everyone wants him to erase.
Even Mahesh Bhupathi can feel
it and stays on to help his friend.
The friend beats Renzo Furlan,
world No. 26, he forces world No.
6 Andre Agassi to a first-set
tie-breaker in the semis but loses.
Now he’s in the play-off for
bronze against Fernando
Meligeni, world No. 93.
I know this kid, I lived 500
yards from him. I am at his
house day after day, sitting with
his father Vece and stepmother
Julie as they search for funds,
look for coaches, struggling
bravely through this incredible
stress of trying to forge an
international tennis career from
a Calcutta house. I see him
make his Davis Cup debut, share
a pizza with him on his birthday
in London, watch him win
junior Wimbledon.
Then he loses the first set to

Meligeni. Some of us are asked
to exit the press box because
we’re cheering and really we
shouldn’t, it’s unprofessional, but
Leander makes tennis personal,
he affects you, he demands your
involvement, till you’re on your
feet before you can stop. He wins
the second set. By the third I
keep slipping out, walking the
perimeter of the stadium outside,
drawing deeply on a Gold Flake,
listening to the scores on the
loudspeaker. I am too nervous to
watch. It’s as if I still don’t
believe this child from the
neighbourhood, who used to
sleep with his football boots—he
played everything—is now on the
verge of an Olympic medal. But
he believes, he swallows his
anxiety, he runs, he chases, he
volleys, he exults, he wins, and
what the hell else do you do at
such a moment but quietly cry
for this boy who refuses to go
deaf to the voice within?
My reaction has to do with
India and all that accumulated

losing, but it’s also about the
compelling beauty of struggle. I
know this now because I will cry
only once more in sport, in 2004,
for an Algerian gazelle named
Hicham El Guerrouj, who fails in
the 1,500m in Atlanta 1996 and
weeps himself, fails in Sydney
2000 and weeps, and then finally
wins in Athens 2004. I meet him
one day years later, I tell him I
cried, and he, smiling, reaches
out to grab my hand.
I think about Leander now and
then. He still plays Davis Cup at
38, but the athlete in him is dying
and that raging voice is softer. But
I hope I never forget that day in
1996. The day he dissolved an
Indian cynicism, the day he
produced such charismatic
courage that he had the capacity
to move, the day when that
strangest of things happened.
Athletes win for themselves first.
But that day, he let us think he
was winning for us.
Rohit Brijnath is a senior
correspondent with The Straits
Times, Singapore.
Write to Rohit at
gametheory@livemint.com
www.livemint.com
Read Rohit’s previous Lounge columns at
www.livemint.com/rohit­brijnath

L6

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ECONOMY

NIRANJAN
RAJADHYAKSHA

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

IT IS SILLY TO DENY THE ACHIEVEMENTS
OF ECONOMIC REFORMS. BUT THE OPEN
ECONOMY HASN’T HAD A SMOOTH SAIL,
AND THE FUTURE WILL PRESENT A SET OF
TOUGH CHALLENGES

a

open sesame

A dozen years after the end
of World War II and near the
high noon of European
social democracy, British
prime minister Harold
Macmillan famously
announced, “Let us be frank
about it: most of our people
have never had it so good.”
Curiously, despite a
wonderful opportunity to infuse
some cheer into the dark
national mood, our political
leaders expressed no such
optimism this July, exactly 20
years after the unlikely
combination of Narasimha Rao
and Manmohan Singh finally
liberated the Indian economy
from overwhelming
government control. A rotting
edifice based on

Onward: Since the
1990s, school
attendance rates
have soared in
India, a sign of new
aspirations.

institutionalized scarcity, price
controls, shoddy products,
protectionism and endemic
underperformance was swiftly
demolished in 100 days of
inspired action.
It takes utter cussedness to
deny the obvious achievements
of greater economic freedom.
Forget the bragging rights that
come with being one of the
most dynamic economies in
the world or the hope of
membership at the global high
table as an emerging
superpower. Ordinary lives
have been changed beyond
recognition thanks to the
opportunities provided by
economic reforms.
Average real incomes have
quadrupled since 1991,

providing ordinary Indians a
rare opportunity to improve
their lot. Ownership of
consumer goods has spread.
Most homes have access to
electricity. School attendance
rates have soared, a sign of
new aspirations. India
accounted for 25% of the
world’s out-of-school
population in 2001; that is now
down to less than 10%. Indians
are eating better, with
consumption of fresh produce
such as vegetables, eggs and
fruit becoming more common.
Higher consumption of meat
and fish could also indicate
that caste rules are weakening
in many parts of the country.
India has an appalling record
on social indicators such as
PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

malnutrition or underweight
children, but there is no doubt
that the direction of change is
right. Few realize that data from
the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) shows how
human development accelerated
in the past 10 years and that
India is on course to meet most
of the millennium development
goals by 2015. UNDP said in its
Human Development Report
2010 that India is sixth in the
list of countries that have
rapidly improved its human
development indicators since
1980. Poverty rates, however
measured, have dropped by at
least 10 percentage points.
Most Indians have never had it
so good.
To be sure, it has not been
all smooth sailing. The 250
million people stagnating at the
bottom fifth of the income
pyramid continue to live in
abject poverty. Inequality is
rising, though there is too little
public discussion about the
reasons. Are millions being left
behind because of social
factors such as caste, or the fact
that they do not have the
capital and skills to participate
in the more dynamic parts of
the economy, or because they
are trapped in regions that do
not have adequate links to
markets? Each reason demands
a different response from
policymakers. However, a
complicated problem has been
reduced to eloquent but
vacuous sermons.
Politics can be transformed
as voters get the freedom to
finally look beyond the daily
struggle for survival and think
about the future. “India is
witness finally to what I have
called the Revolution of
Perceived Possibilities,”
economist Jagdish Bhagwati
told parliamentarians in
December, when he delivered
the third Hiren Mukherjee
lecture. “Aroused economic
aspirations for betterment have
led to political demands for
the politicians to deliver yet
more. This suggests, as my
Columbia University colleague
Arvind Panagariya and I have
hypothesized, that voters will
look to vote for the politicians
who can deliver growth, so
that we would expect growth
before the vote to be
correlated with vote now.”
Building on the gains of the
past two decades and
addressing the failures will
require political imagination
from various groups over the
next decade.
The Left needs to realize
that the poor can move into
higher-paying jobs in modern
sectors and the government
can fund an effective welfare
state only if the Indian
economy continues to grow
at close to double-digit rates,
which will require a further
dose of economic reforms
that the Left instinctively
distrusts. One possible model
is Brazil under Luiz Inácio
Lula, a man of the Left and
perhaps the most successful

political leader in the past 10
years, with a winning
combination of free-market
economics and a well-funded
welfare state that has reduced
poverty and inequality.
The Right has its own sets of
challenges. It hopes that India
will be able to strut more
confidently on the global stage
but refuses to accept the
multilateral compromises that
go with being a global player,
even on key issues such as
extinguishing the Pakistani
military-jihadi complex. The
cultural conservatives will have
to live with the fact that greater
global trade and investment is
needed for prosperity but that
such linkages will naturally
undercut many social
arrangements. The
conservative philosopher
Michael Oakeshott pointed out
many years ago that change is
always a threat to identity.
The biggest challenge before
the business class is to ensure
that the current concerns about
the rise of crony capitalism do
not eventually lead to a
full-blown legitimacy crisis for
Indian capitalism. Engaging
with the rest of society is
essential. The angry response
by influential businessmen,
after some of their peers were
arrested on corruption charges,
reveals a shocking degree of
myopia, almost on a par with
the opposition of the Bombay
Club to the 1991 reforms.
Economic researchers have
shown that liberal capitalism
has little resonance in many
countries because the vast
majority believes that fortunes
have been made through
favours rather than hard work
and innovation.
The middle class faces its
own set of paradoxes. It has
done well since 1991 but has
withdrawn into a shell as far as
public participation goes. The
very people who have gained
from greater economic freedom
have little faith in the
institutions of political
freedom, rarely even bothering
to vote during elections and at
other times either banking on
charlatans or on single-issue
movements that have no
respect for the inherent
trade-offs in politics and policy.
In contrast, the poor, who have
little economic freedom, are
the backbone of our system of
political freedom. More
generally, the middle class has
moved into the sanitized world
of gated communities, private
schools, private hospitals and
air-conditioned cars.
How each of these
contradictions is resolved could
play a big role in deciding
which way India goes in the
next 10 years—a million
exasperated mutinies, a
sclerotic oligarchic capitalism
where competition and new
ideas are shut out, a violent
nationalism that is mistaken for
patriotism, or a genuinely open
economy and open society.
niranjan.r@livemint.com

L7

LOUNGE
INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

MONEY

SAGARIKA
GHOSE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

IT WAS THE ‘GENIE’GENERATION WHEN
LAKSHMI WAS SOCIETY’S MUSE AND WE FOR
THE FIRST TIME BELIEVED IN MONEY
WITHOUT SHAME, GUILT OR HYPOCRISY

the make­a­stash
philosophy

i
Holy cash: An
artistic
interpretation of
Lakshmi, the
Hindu goddess of
wealth, by Atul
Dodiya.

In the 1990s, as the era of
the licence permit raj began
to fade, so did the moral
odour around the concept of
money. Money became not
only a legitimate aspiration,
but for the first time in
independent India, making
money or openly aspiring to
make money became
morally acceptable.
The khadi-clad freedom
fighters of the 1940s marched
for the tricolour and shunned
foreign-made riches. The
“bush shirt”-wearing
Nehruvians of the 1950s and
1960s, busy with
nation-building, scorned
money-making as infra-dig.
The kurta and chappal-clad
Naxals and Angry Young Men
of the 1970s and 1980s roared
against an unfair establishment
which monopolized immoral
wealth. Money was still a dirty
word then. But in the 1990s
was born the materialist
Indian, for whom the only
revolutions were the revolution
of expectation and the
revolution of money-making.
Lakshmi had been a shy
goddess in the postindependence period. Khadi,
charkha and satyagraha were
the foundations of our newly
acquired freedom. Socialist
austerity and an elaborate
hypocrisy about wealth
underpinned an economy
whose “commanding heights”
were held firmly in the hands
of the leviathan state.
Bollywood traditionally
depicted business and
enterprise as sinister
machinations of quasicriminals. Businessmen were
invariably hairy medallion men
in white shoes quaffing illicit
bottles of Vat 69.
But in the 1990s, Lakshmi
leapt out of hiding and took
centre stage as society’s new
muse. As finance minister
Manmohan Singh slashed at
the tentacles of the licence
raj, the shackles of the mind
broke apart too. A study
commissioned by Ogilvy and
Mather (O&M) in 1997
discovered what O&M called
the “Genie” generation
or a generation who
independently engaged in
society. In the survey, 70% of
metropolitan youth in the age
group 18-28 said making
money and being materialistic
(not making revolutions or
changing society) was their
goal in life. In a 1998
Outlook-Mode survey of
youth across major metros, a
majority said their role model
was Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Bollywood mirrored the
change. The 1994 smash hit
Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! was
set against the backdrop of an
extravagant, flamboyantly
wealthy family wedding.
Glittering saris and flashy
jewellery, fabulously ornate
interiors combined with the
devotional rituals of a Hindu
wedding to consolidate the

image of money as aesthetic as
well as moral.
The 1995 hit Dilwale
Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ)
was similarly set in an
ostentatiously affluent yet
traditional Indian household
where characters were no
longer middle class or rural
but unapologetically and
unabashedly wealthy. DDLJ
marked the beginning of films
that were no longer shot in the
modest hills of Shimla but in
flashy locales across Europe.
On ski slopes, in tulip gardens
and on fashionable high
streets. Rich people were now
good people. The hero was no
longer a dock worker or coolie
but a scion of a wealthy
family. The heroine was often
the daughter of an equally
wealthy clan. Role models
transformed completely. For
the first time the Hindi film
hero openly made money,
often lived overseas and had a
globalized lifestyle.
The Wall Street dream had
already gripped the Indian
elite in the 1980s, but in 1994
when Kolkata boy and Indian
Institute of Technology (IIT)
graduate Rajat Gupta was
elected the first managing
director of McKinsey born
outside the US, he became the
poster boy of the new culture
of “honest” money-making.
Gupta came from a
middle-class Bengali
background, his father was a
freedom fighter and his mother
a schoolteacher.
His anointing as head
honcho at McKinsey signalled
a powerful change in the
mentality of the Indian middle
class. The open pursuit of
wealth was no longer
considered sinful. Instead it
was a duty, almost a new
phase of nation-building, to
take the India story to newer
heights and to shed past
hypocrisy about wanting to be
rich but keeping it a secret.
For the first time, Indian
millionaires began to feature in
Forbes lists. The takeover of
Silicon Valley by IIT-trained
engineers continued apace and
the setting up of the business
process outsourcing (BPO) and
software industry meant that
being rich, middle class and
Indian were no longer a
contradiction in terms.
The pursuit of wealth and
success also brought a
transformation in how Indians
perceived their career goals.
Cyrus Broacha went to acting
school in New York, studied
law for a year, worked in an ad
agency before getting his big
break as an MTV veejay.
Becoming a VJ or RJ would
have been unthinkable to
professionals of the 1960s and
1970s. But in the 1990s they
became legitimate and highly
aspirational. The money they
offered after all was the sole
determinant of success.
The 1990s was also the
decade of the big advances in

publishing. Vikram Seth
received a whopping £250,000
(around `1.8 crore now) for
his book A Suitable Boy and
Arundhati Roy sold the UK
rights of The God Of Small
Things for £150,000. The hype
and glamour around these
books was due in large part
to the money they received
and wannabe novelists across
India dreamt of similar
get-rich-quick novels. Roy
quickly became a role model
for aspiring writers, not just for
the book she wrote, but
primarily because of the
money she earned.
In the media too, the 1990s
saw the advent of sales and
marketing departments play an
increasingly dominant role in
journalism. Newspapers,
pioneered by The Times of
India, became money-making
ventures, determined to boost
profits and profitability. The

circulation of The Times of
India is reported to have
touched 1.6 million copies
nationwide after it launched its
colour supplements like Delhi
Times. The circulation of
Hindustan Times (published by
HT Media Ltd, that also
publishes Mint) grew by 50,000
copies in Delhi after the
launch of HT City.
“Page 3” was born. Rich,
glamorous celebrities whose
wedding anniversaries and
parties were celebrated
through glossy pictures in
colour supplements were
ambassadors of the new
culture of money. After
decades of dreary socialist tea
parties, conspicuous
consumption, lavish parties
and beautiful clothes
exploded on to our senses
with neon-lit force, creating an
alliance of beauty, success and
power with unembarrassed

display of wealth.
In the electronic media, the
monopoly of Doordarshan
faded and there was the rise of
private satellite television. The
money revolution on TV would
reach its pinnacle in Kaun
Banega Crorepati, launched at
the end of the decade in 2000.
The show became the
culmination of the Indian
middle-class’ forthright,
publicly expressed aspiration
for big money.
“I believe in money,” said a
character in the 1940s play The
Queen and the Rebels by Ugo
Betti. It was only in the 1990s
that for the first time since
independence, the Indian
could say the same thing,
without guilt or hypocrisy.
Sagarika Ghose is deputy
editor, CNN-IBN.
Write to lounge@livemint.com
COURTESY ATUL DODIYA

AND

CHEMOULD PRESCOTT ROAD

L8

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

The numbers game:
A cumulative result of
economic reforms was
the Sensex reaching
10,000 points for the
first time within 20
years of its launch.

REFORMS

SALIL TRIPATHI

PV NARASIMHA RAO AND HIS FINANCE MINISTER
UNCAGED A TIGER. THE ECONOMY’S DYNAMISM
SHATTERED OLD RULES AND THE PECKING ORDER OF
INDIA’S LEADING COMPANIES CHANGED

o

march of the elephant

On an unusually hot day in
August 1990 in Al Ruweishid, I
stood at the border crossing
between Iraq and Jordan, where
officials ignored trucks carrying
goods to Iraq defying UN
sanctions, paying close attention
to the flow of poor Indians,
Pakistanis, Palestinians and
Egyptians entering Jordan. By
law Jordan had to accept the
men as refugees, but the officers
were worried that these men
would remain in Jordan, rather
than return home.
That was India’s fate then.
Indians would consider any
country—even Jordan, with its
vast stretches where nothing
grew. Mother India simply could
not feed everyone or create jobs
for everyone. The good life was
accessible to those who were
born in the right family, became
babus and accepted corrupt
ways, secured permits, licences
and prevented others from
getting there, or became
professionals. India was not
where you hoped to prosper, but
which many chose to leave.
Parents scoured matrimonial ads
looking for green card-holding
suitable boys and girls.
Everything was scarce—jobs, gas
connections, foreign exchange,
and telephone lines. Shopping
lists Indians gave to their
relatives returning from abroad
included Toblerone chocolates,
Pampers, sanitary napkins, and
Marks & Spencer’s lingerie.
Businesses needed permission
for everything and the state
planned everything: how many
safety pins can be made, who
could make them, how large
could that company grow, could
it borrow, at what rate, and how
many workers it could hire—
firing them was out of question.
Meanwhile, the world
changed. The fall of the Berlin
Wall meant the market India
took for granted—the Soviet
bloc—ceased to exist.
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait led to
a sudden increase in oil prices,

throwing India’s balance of
payments in utter disarray. India
had to pledge some of its gold
reserves to the Bank of England
to remain liquid. Such was the
context in which Indian officials
loosened controls and expanded
economic freedoms. As a foreign
correspondent in Singapore, I
witnessed India’s sometimes
charming, often clumsy, at times
sincere, but also partly reluctant
efforts to liberalize the economy.
When elephants learn to dance,
it isn’t always pretty; if it takes
two to tango, in the early 1990s,
investors wanted to know how
sincere India was.
In 1993, at the end of a
reception for India’s original
reformer, prime minister P.V.
Narasimha Rao, at the home of
the Indian high commissioner in
Singapore, some of us reporters
were talking to some of India’s
leading businessmen. Between
them, they ran large businesses
in cement, tractors, shipping,
power transmission lines, and
financial services. But instead of
getting to meet the heads of
Singapore’s leading companies—
Keppel, Sembawang or Temasek
Holdings—they were introduced
to prominent traders from the
local Indian chamber of
commerce, with local businesses
like Scotts Holdings, which was
at that time Indian-owned,
hosting receptions (a dozen years
later, in Davos, the story was
different: I saw some of the same
executives mingling with the
heads of the world’s largest
corporations, who were queueing
up to shake hands with
Palaniappan Chidambaram, then
the finance minister).
In 1992 in Singapore, the
flavour of the month was
Vietnam, whose reforms, called
doi moi, had excited investors.
Overseas Chinese businessmen
put money in China, in spite of
1989’s Tiananmen Square
massacre. A leading
Singaporean-Indian
businessman even called himself

“a chocolate Chinaman”, lest he
be mistaken for an Indophile. It
was in such an environment that
Indian businesses sought
investors’ attention. India was
unpredictable; it was stodgy and
bureaucratic. N. Vittal, at that
time India’s secretary in the
department of electronics, told
investors: “We used to tie you up
with red tape; now we are rolling
out the red carpet.” He
encouraged Singaporean
companies and Singapore-based
multinationals to hire more
Indians, saying: “Brain drain is
better than brain in the drain.”
Visiting Indian executives had
to measure every penny before
spending it. Once, two executives
from a leading Indian company
were forced to share a hotel
room because unexpectedly they
had to foot a steep bill for dinner
with a client, and they ran short
of foreign exchange, and their
credit cards were valid only in
India and Nepal. To that, add
memories of Coca-Cola and IBM
leaving India in 1977, Swadeshi
Jagran Manch’s attacks on
foreign investment (“India is a
country, not a market”). Had
India really changed? Was India
a reluctant bride?
But the reforms Rao and his
finance minister Manmohan
Singh initiated, uncaged the
tiger. Unleashed, the economy’s
dynamism changed old rules.
The pecking order of India’s
leading companies changed. In
1993, when I did a story on
Indian companies in Bangalore
to watch out for, I had
mentioned Biocon and Infosys,
neither of which was even a $10
million (around `44 crore now)
company. Over that decade,
Indians moved from being code
maintainers, Y2K fixers, and
phone conversationalists at
outsourcing centres, to devising
information technology strategy;
executives at multinationals
stepped up from being
vice-presidents to chief executive
officers. Jobs that never existed

opened up, like Indian teachers
tutoring American children
online, Indian medic assistants
making medical transcripts. And
Indian companies expanded
abroad. Stephen Roach of
Morgan Stanley would observe
that unlike in China, Indian
malls had consumers, not
gawkers, and the consumers
were Indians, not foreigners.
While that boom was real,
what about the tribals in
Chhattisgarh, and the Vidarbha
farmers? Weren’t they being left
behind? Indeed, many were—but
it was not a consequence of
reforms; reforms were bypassing
them. Confusing coincidence, or
correlation for causality, some
critics said their real plight was
because of liberalization. But
India had always dispossessed
and ignored tribals who were
bullied by the state.
Did inequality worsen? But it
would: Simon Kuznets’ seminal
curve shows how income
inequality worsens initially as a
country grows, but over time
inequality decreases. Inequality
is bad when it is the result of
imbalances designed to deny
opportunity to those who lack
them. While the Gini coefficient,
which measures inequality,
worsened between 1993 and
2005, the difference—from 0.30
to 0.32 overall, and from 0.28 to
0.29 in rural India (from 0.34 to
0.37 in urban India)—suggests
that the impact was less severe
than what critics made out.
The great development
challenge is to extend the
dynamism of liberalization to
those denied access and equal
opportunity. That does not make
accounts of horrendous poverty
suspect, nor does it make the
suicides of farmers any less
tragic. But think of this: In 1991,
35.8% of India’s 846 million
people, or about 300 million
people, lived on less than one
dollar a day, the measure
economists use to define
absolute poverty. Ten years later,

the figure dropped to 27.5%. By
2006, with India’s population at
1.02 billion people, it meant
there were 270 million people
living in absolute poverty. In the
intervening years, when India
added 156 million people, those
living in absolute poverty fell by
30 million. Had the poverty rate
remained 35.8%, there would
have been 365 million poor. The
economy lifted 95 million people
out of absolute poverty.
Stocks rose higher. The
Sensex reached 10,000 for the
first time within 20 years of its
launch—perhaps the fastest
such growth for any major index
worldwide. With exports, foreign
reserves rose, making it easier
for Indian businesses to borrow
hard currency and acquire
businesses abroad. Ranbaxy’s
early investments were followed
by Tata, Mahindra, and Bharti
Airtel, and Tata’s British assets
now include Tetley Tea, Jaguar
Land Rover, and Corus Steel.
Earlier this year, Ratan Tata
shocked the delicate sensibilities
of British establishment by
complaining about the
lazy work culture of British
middle management.
India’s rise will bother many.
When Lakshmi Mittal wanted to
buy Arcelor, its then chief
executive Guy Dolle ridiculed
Mittal’s aspiration, saying that
Arcelor made perfume, but
Mittal only offered cheap eau de
cologne. A few weeks later Mittal
owned Arcelor.
As India tries to reclaim its
erstwhile predominant position
in the global economy, it has
the opportunity to show that
economic and political
freedoms can go hand-in-hand;
that to grow you don’t have to
be authoritarian, and
democracy doesn’t hinder
wealth. That might sound false
to those still in awe of China.
But India is not China, and
that’s worth celebrating.
Write to lounge@livemint.com

L9

LOUNGE
INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

CAREER

PARAM
ARUNACHALAM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

IN 1995, PARAM ARUNACHALAM JOINED THE
LITTLE­KNOWN INFOSYS TECHNOLOGIES. IT
WAS A CAREER TRANSFORMATION THAT IS
SYMBOLIC OF THE CHANGE OPEN MARKETS
BROUGHT TO OUR OFFICES

y

employee no. 2,482

Early bloomer:
Arunachalam, who now
runs a start­up, left
Infosys in 2009.

You find one of these fellows in
every engineering college everywhere. We also had a palmist in
our batch. And some of us would
go to him and ask him to do his
predictions. He looked at mine
and said that I would make
much money and travel around
the world.
This was a different time. I had
no idea I would be joining Infosys. I was a chemical engineering
student from KREC Suratkal
(now National Institute of Technology, or NITK). Chemical engineers didn’t travel around the
world in those days. I thought,
then, that his prediction
was...unlikely to come true.
After graduating I joined Kirloskar Group as a management
trainee. The company was a big
name in those days.
I wouldn’t say it was a bad job.
Management trainees were
rotated between several departments. You got to travel a lot. For
instance, I was once posted to a
town in Rajahmundry district. I
loved the Andhra food. But it
was a one-horse kind of town.
One post office, one hospital...
but five cinema theatres.
But at that time labour was
cheap. You could do whatever
you wanted with trainees. Or do
nothing at all. One of my last
assignments on rotation was to
spend some time in Surat. This
was when I was working in the
pollution control department.
There was a vendor in Surat who
made water clarifiers for us.
There were delays in shipping
and the company sent me to figure out what was going on.

I sat in the vendor’s office
from 9am to 6pm. Every hour or
so I would get up and ask him
for updates. That is all. Everyday.
From morning to evening. I
would get frequent reminders
from my office. And then I would
go and pester him even more.
Then I rotated to Kirloskar’s
Bangalore office. By this time
most of the guys in my friends
circle had started working in
IT. There were maybe seven or
eight of us. And six of them
had already moved. So I began
to wonder.
One day, in 1995, I saw a job
advertisement for Infosys. But I
decided to attend an interview
because of one more reason. The
interviews were for the new Infosys Mangalore office. Mangalore
is close to my engineering college. So I figured that it would be
a good chance to drop in at the
campus as well.
I was employee No. 2,482
when I joined Infosys Ltd. The
numbering in the company
begins at 1,000. So I was among
the first 1,500 employees. Today
the Infosys training centre in
Mysore handles 14,000 people
at a time.
My family was shocked. As
far as my parents and grandparents were concerned, Kirloskar was a huge name. I was
giving up all that to join an
unknown little company. For
years they were unhappy. Until
2001, when I used my stock
options to buy a flat.
You have no idea, when you
work for a company like Kirloskar, what working for an Info-

sys is like. No idea. You don’t
even know what to expect. What
the work would be like. What the
facilities are like. What the campus is like. Everything was a surprise. Though in the beginning
the campus was still being built
in Mangalore. So during training
we sat in this huge hall with a
blue curtain through the middle
dividing it into two. One half was
a classroom and the other half a
computer lab. After each session,
25 of us used to pick up our
chairs and walk through the curtain for the next one.
At Kirloskar, there was a lot
of paperwork. A lot of time was
spent getting various people to
sign and approve various
things. So imagine how excited
we all were about email. Email
was huge and trainees didn’t
get email.
The biggest change for me, in
terms of work culture, was the
intensity. At Kirloskar, like I said
before, labour was always considered a low-cost commodity.
But at Infosys we were constantly
working. Once, during a meeting
with NRN (N.R. Narayana
Murthy), we complained that
Bangalore only worked for five
days a week while Mangalore
worked for six. He gave us a spiel
about us being new and
untrained. But then said that if
he could, he would make Bangalore work six days as well.
Five hours of sleep in a day
was common. All of us kept tab
of the longest time we spent with
no sleep. Mine was 36 hours. I
must have been a slacker
because there were people who

did a lot more.
Of course, if I had been at
Kirloskar I would have slept a
lot more.
Monday and Tuesday were
tie days (later changed to Monday only). We used to hate
wearing ties in the sultry Mangalore weather. Over time
though, it became a symbol of
“we are different”. We would go
to really seedy restaurants with
ties on and enjoy watching people gaping at us.
I began travelling. We worked
hard on those trips as well. I
once went to Paris for 45 days
and managed to get just one
day to do any sight-seeing.
Then I came back and waited
for my next chance. Once they
kept sending other people
abroad and I began to get frustrated. Meanwhile I had no
option but to work harder and
harder. Eventually I won a
chairman’s award for performance. Which was a piece of
paper with stock options. I had
no idea what to do with it.
Then in 2001, I decided to buy
a house in Kochi. Suddenly, I
realized how valuable that piece
of paper was. I used the options
to pay for the flat. Finally my
family decided that Infosys had
been a good decision after all.
Yes, I suppose things would
have been different indeed if I
had stuck to Kirloskar. Sometimes I look at my batchmates
who stuck to their industries and
feel a certain grudging respect.
Some of them perhaps didn’t
make a lot of money. But...there
is a certain respect.
ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Would I have worked as hard
in Kirloskar? I don’t think so.
But there is no point in thinking
like that. The problem with the
IT industry, as a whole, I think,
is that sometimes you lose track
of the bigger picture. You are so
obsessed with your work and
the intensity, that you forgot
what it is doing to you and your
family. I think a lot of young
people have that problem these
days and not just in IT.
Three things happened while I
was living and working in the US
that made me stop and think.
First, I once fell asleep at the
wheel of my car out of exhaustion. I think it was December
2005 in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. We had pulled an allnighter. I rear-ended the car in
front of me. Thankfully, no significant damage was done
because the traffic was slow.
Then once my wife left me
with my child. It was a Saturday.
We used to send our son to a
day care but because he was sick
and it was a holiday for me, we
decided to let him stay home.
My son was sleeping, so I said I
was OK to get on a conference
call. Midway through the call,
right in the middle of what was
my section of the call, my son
woke up, walked in and wanted
to be held. The call was “important”, so I went into another
room and closed the door
behind me. My son started crying but I kind of shut it out since
I was focused on the call. When
it was finally over, and I went to
finally pick him up, my son was
in terrible shape from crying.
Then I was diagnosed with
psoriatic arthritis. I had to take
time off work and spend a lot of
time at home. That gave me a lot
of time to think.
I left Infosys in 2009 and
spent a year doing nothing.
Now I work on a start-up.
When I left the company, I
drew up an excel sheet with all
my assets and liabilities. I
entered inflation estimates and
cost of living estimates and all
that. I figured that for a few
years I could make do with the
savings I had. So financially,
yes, some of us from those early
years did well for ourselves.
When it comes to Infosys, I
have many feelings about the way
things are today. It is very different from those early days in a hall
in Mangalore. When people criticize the company I get very
defensive. I have had fights with
my father over this. But with my
friends from Infosys I sometimes
admit to those same problems.
Would life have been different
if I’d never left Kirloskar? Who
knows? I don’t really think about
that all that much.
Param Arunachalam is an IT
professional and founder of
technology start-up, Mavrix
(www.mavrix.in). Mavrix is an
early stage start-up with a vision
to make it easy and fun for music
lovers to discover new songs
based on their tastes for music.
As told to Sidin Vadukut.
Write to lounge@livemint.com

WHAT STARTED AS A SMALL ‘EQUAL
OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER’ COMPANY SET
MANY NEW STANDARDS IN THE 1990s,
INCLUDING IN CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY

more than tech savvy

i

In 1995, I was a staff writer at
The Hindu Business Line in
Chennai and had wrangled, for
the paper’s management
supplement, an interview with
Hatim Tyabji, then CEO of
VeriFone Inc., a company with
progressive people policies. The
interview was in Bangalore, a
city I am always happy to travel
to, and where my sister, a
technical writer, was then based.
The family subsequently gave
her up to Uncle Sam, as is the
norm for all TamBrahm families
of a certain vintage with more
than one child (as writer R.K.
Narayan once remarked,
Chennai is a city of parents).
The interview went well; later
that evening, a senior reporter
at the Bangalore bureau of the
paper asked me and my
section editor whether we
would like to accompany her to
Electronics City for a press
briefing by what she termed
a-relatively-unknown-but-verypromising-company.
My memory is a little hazy
about why Infosys Technologies
Ltd (now Infosys Ltd) had called
a press conference, but I do
remember almost everything
else. We toured the campus,
which back then comprised just
one building, now called the
Heritage Block. The company’s
managing director, N.R.
Narayana Murthy, proudly
showed off the ramps at the
building (for wheelchairs) and
said Infosys would be an equal
opportunity employer. He then
delivered a stirring speech about
how the company was already
sharing its wealth through

employee stock option, or Esop,
programmes and how it would
create at least 200 millionaires
by the end of the decade. I
recall that a buzz went through
the assembled journalists.
Many of them, I later learnt,
were new to business reporting.
One, I discovered, had been a
crime reporter—one of
Bangalore’s best.
I now realize that it was a
combination of several things, all
new and novel, and all related,
that resulted in Infosys becoming
the poster boy and pin-up girl of
Indian industry and enterprise in
the 1990s. One, although Infosys
had been founded almost a
decade ago, in 1981 (as Infosys
Consulting), it was the economic
crisis of 1991 and the country’s
subsequent decision to accelerate
the process of integrating the
domestic economy with the
global one that helped it become
the force it is. One of these
changes, the abolition of the
so-called Controller of Capital
Issues, allowed Infosys to raise
money by selling shares to the
public, although it didn’t have a
“track record” of profits. Two, the
opening up of the Indian
economy resulted in the growth
of business publications—some
of them had been around, but
many came around the same
time economic reforms did;
Business Today, for which I wrote
several cover stories on Infosys,
was founded in 1991; The Hindu
Business Line in 1993. Until then,
the prevailing sentiment among
business journalists was that all
companies were crooked and
that all businessmen were crooks

(I may be overstating the case a
bit here). After 1991, Indian
reporters and readers started
preferring a style of journalism
perfected by Fortune magazine—
the CEO as a rock star. That
would change in the mid-2000s
again, but that’s another story.
Three, for eager business
journalists (including this writer)
looking to do such stories, Infosys
provided ideal fodder. Some of its
promoters had graduated from
one of the handful of Indian
Institutes of Technology (IITs),
itself a middle-class dream; they
seemed a decent bunch and
talked of doing business the right
way; the managing director spoke
of sharing wealth; the company
set new standards for corporate
disclosure and financial
transparency; and, maybe
because of all this, its shares
rose and rose.
Some of these may seem
trivial in 2011. The media is
more clear-headed in its
coverage now—Mint was there
at the beginning of this trend in
2007—and Infosys itself is in
the middle of a controversy
over alleged visa violations in
the US and is just recovering
from some unseemly events
surrounding succession to the
top spot (which, to date, has
gone firmly according to script,
from promoter to promoter to
promoter to promoter). And
lest we forget, there was the
popular backlash a few years
ago against the company’s
internal restructuring.
In 1991, all this was in a future
no one could see. Back then,
knowledge of COBOL didn’t

make you a dinosaur—a
grass-eating one—and was,
instead, a desired attribute in
employees and prospective
sons-in-law. Back then, body
shopping wasn’t infra-dig (and
didn’t run afoul of visa regimes).
Back then, it was a rare company
that shared its wealth with
employees and a rarer company
that stuck to the straight and
narrow. And the sheer chutzpah
of six professionals (the seventh
left in the late 1980s or early
1990s, depending on who you
listen to) who set out to build a
company the right way caught
everyone’s imagination.
Until then, India’s middle
class hadn’t dared to entertain
entrepreneurial dreams. Infosys
changed that.
It wasn’t the only change it
rung in.
As the company’s scrip soared,
several of its employees who had
been given stock options found
themselves wealthy.
Once, in the CEO’s secretariat
at Infosys, the only place where
you would find office boys, I was
served coffee by a man who was
worth several times what I was.
He had just bought a house (for
`39 lakh, and this was in 2000 or
2001). Others did far more
evolved things with the money.
Umesh Malhotra, one of Infosys’
early hires from IIT Madras,
started a reading-and-learning
centre for children in Bangalore
called Hippocampus with money
he got from selling Infosys shares.
Another, who worked in the
administration department and
once accompanied then CFO
Mohandas Pai and me on a

4-hour tour of Infosys’ new
campus in 2000, has used some
of the money he got by selling
Infosys shares to start a hospital.
Indeed, many of the employees
who got Infosys stock—the
company’s stock option
programme was short-lived—did
well by themselves and by the
world around them.
The promoters did so too.
Murthy, the co-founder who
started it all, has decided to use
some of his money to fund
entrepreneurs. Rohini Nilekani,
the wife of another co-founder
Nandan Nilekani, started asking
the kind of questions about
how to use the money well that
others were asking in other
parts of the world and has
emerged not only as an expert
on the subject but also one of
the biggest individual givers in
the country (full disclosure: she
edited and anchored Mint’s
series on philanthropy).
Nandan himself has parlayed
his innate intelligence and years
spent in the corner room at
Infosys into a position that
effectively makes him the
government’s chief technology
officer, or, as the man himself
likes to describe it, a “plumber”.
In Bangalore and in the rest of
India, these trends—of the new
rich giving back, materially and
otherwise—are well-established
now, and not restricted to one
company or even one industry.
But it was Infosys that, at least in
some ways, started it all. And it
all came together in the 1990s.
R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.
sukumar.r@livemint.com

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IF YOU LIVE IN AN INDIAN CITY, YOU LIVE WITH
REBUILDING AND RENAMING. BUT BANGALORE,
ONE OF THE WORLD’S FASTEST GROWING CITIES
BETWEEN 1981 AND 2004, URGED YOU TO THINK
BEYOND PHYSICAL CHANGE

how bangalore saw
the big picture

l
Green piece: Trees,
such as the ones lining
this road, are
constantly under
threat in Bangalore,
facing an explosion of
construction.

Let me tell you what this article
will not talk about.
It will not talk about the little
things that defined Bangalore:
the sun-shaded tunnels of green
created by the arching canopies
of grand, old rain trees; the
peaked, wooden overhangs
called “monkey tops”, which
once graced every window on
every sprawling bungalow; a
climate so agreeable that no
house was built with fans; a
gentility that allowed migrant
and local to live a life of calm
reflection and commune with the
great outdoors every day; an
effortless multiculturalism that
accommodated a variety of
cultures and beliefs; and the light
wind that blows almost
incessantly through the city, the
Bangalore breeze.
Too many people in
modern-day Bengaluru (do not
expect me to use this name, for
the synapses that control
nomenclature in my brain resist
rewiring) talk of these things and
times gone by. Too many appear
steeped in a past that will never
return. One city tabloid has a
daily column in which old timers
reminisce of their Bangalore.
Other newspapers reveal a
similar, strange affinity for faded
days and forgotten ways. For a
city more globalized than any
other in India, for a city that
destroys its heritage so ruthlessly
and efficiently, for a city that
embodies the future like no
other, Bangalore has a strange
way of not letting go of the past.
This could be because “the
past” in Bangalore is, often, no
more than 20 years away.
If you live in an Indian city,
you live with change—constant
rebuilding, tearing down,
renaming, and the acceptance
of a metaphor that says, if you

want to enter a new life, you
must die to another. In
Bangalore, whatever passes,
lives on as part of city’s great
brains trust. In Bangalore, the
future does not come—as the
American cold-war statesman
Dean Acheson put it—one day
at a time. It comes many weeks
or many months at once.
Between 1981 and 2004,
Bangalore gained the dubious
honour of being one of the
world’s fastest-growing cities. Its
population doubled, from 3.1
million to more than 6 million,
compressing what should have
been a slow metamorphosis into
an explosion of disruptive
change. Between 1995 and 2005,
more than five multinational
companies streamed into the
city every month.
The Bangalore breeze is about
the only thing from the old town
that physically survives the
transition to the 21st century (so,
too, do a few tunnels of rain
trees, but every day they suffer
new assaults). Since its great
acceleration into globalization
during the 1990s, Bangalore has
lost about 70% of its once endless
sea of trees, the local forest
department estimates. In a city
once known for its cleanliness,
only a third of the garbage is
collected, as plastic bags spill
their decomposing contents on
street corners. A third of the city’s
8 million people live below the
poverty line—1.5 million in
slums—and less than a fifth are a
part of the globalized elite.
But if there is one thing
Bangalore forces you to do, it is
to look at the big picture, even if
some brush strokes are smudged.
Globalization brought
unprecedented opportunity to
the city that I, of no fixed
address, consider my hometown.

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s
in a city that taught me the
virtues of easy living, sang froid
and deep thinking.
Bangalore does that to you. It
urges you to think beyond your
boundaries. It helps you
collaborate with new people and
new ideas. It provides an
atmosphere that lets you join the
dots. “I was in Bangalore, the
Silicon Valley of India, when I
realized the world was flat,” says
writer Thomas Friedman in The
World is Flat, his 2005 best-seller
on globalization.
By flat, Friedman means the
connectedness born from new
technologies as trade and
political barriers fall, allowing
anyone, anywhere to do
business with anyone, anywhere
in the world.
For hundreds of companies
and a few million people, the big
picture started to emerge in
Bangalore during the 1990s. It
was during this decade that
academic Bangalore—the city
that India’s first prime minister
Jawaharlal Nehru posited as the
nation’s intellectual
capital—sensed the opportunities
offered by the opening of the
Indian economy and the
demand, primarily from the US,
for cheap, intelligent labour for
global technology markets. This
was the formative decade for
Infosys, Wipro and a handful of
other Indian companies that
were tapping global markets. In
1997, Karnataka became the first
Indian state to announce an
information technology policy (as
we shall see later, that was the
last look the government may
have taken at the big picture). It
was in the 1990s that some of the
world’s biggest tech companies,
such as IBM, Sun Microsystems,
Cisco, Philips, Intel and Nortel,

entered Bangalore. Today,
Bangalore contributes about 34%
to India’s total outsourcing
revenue of nearly $50 billion
(around `2.25 trillion). This flat
world created for the city a wildly
diverse economy. The business
of technology employs a little
more than half a million people,
but it provides employment to
maybe five times that number in
sectors that closely follow the rise
of a young, globalized elite. From
construction to taxi services to
retail to education, the demand
for blue-collar, white-collar and
collarless professionals is
ceaseless. More than half the
population is from abroad or
from other parts of India, says
The Bangalore Story, a 2010
report by Tholons, a global
strategic advisory company.
A transformation so rapid,
from small town to global
metropolis, is obviously not easy
on those who see change but are
not a part of it. So, the 1990s saw
the most visible, violent protests
against change. This was the
decade when farmers and
Kannada chauvinists ransacked
the first outlet of Kentucky Fried
Chicken, picketed multinationals
Cargill Seeds and Monsanto, and
protested the Ms Universe
contest. As the economy swelled
to embrace more people, such
protests quickly faded, as did
Bangalore’s once-regular riots
and confrontations—between
Hindu and Muslim, Tamilians
and Kannadigas, between
congregations of various
languages in Christian churches.
The 1990s also revealed that
while Bangalore’s citizens were
going global with a speed rarely
seen before in the world, its
politicians and public services,
which should have prepared for
transformation, faltered badly.

“In the early 1990s, the quality of
public service agencies in
Bangalore was noticeably
declining,” says German
geographer Christoph Dittrich in
a paper, Bangalore: Globalisation
and Fragmentation in India’s
High-Tech Capital. “Despite
being the centre of India’s
information technology boom,
electricity, water and garbage
disposal services were unreliable,
if accessible at all, and providers
lacked accountability.”
The World Bank says half the
middle-income population faces
daily demands for bribes from
public servants. Bangalore’s rise
as one of the world’s hot tech
cities often obscures, to those
who run it, the primary source of
its new wealth: global investors.
There is scant regard for the fact
that the city is more vulnerable
than any other in India to a
global recession, and there is
little effort in retaining global
confidence in Bangalore by
transforming its infrastructure
and offering more equality to its
disregarded poor.
There is one other thing that
remains from the old city,
something that isn’t threatened,
yet. If you are in Bangalore and,
if, after a profitable and/or
pleasing day at work, you are
vexed by the traffic, the pollution,
the unruliness and the
acquisitiveness of people, raise
your head and watch the sky.
The days tend to end in a blaze
of glory. As you watch the
spectacular, crimson slashes of a
Bangalore sunset, you cannot fail
to see the big picture.
Samar Halarnkar is
editor-at-large, Mint and
Hindustan Times.
Write to lounge@livemint.com
ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

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PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

CHESS

VISWANATHAN
ANAND

HIS RISE THROUGH THE 1990s NOT
ONLY ESTABLISHED HIS GENIUS, BUT
ALSO SPAWNED A GENERATION

star of the orient

GERD SCHEEWEL/BONGARTS/GETTY IMAGES

B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN

i

arun.j@livemint.com

···························
Is this at gunpoint?” Viswanathan Anand wants to know
when asked whether he has ever
thought about his legacy. It’s a
subject he would rather not talk
about, for “your legacy should be
written by others, preferably
when you are gone,” he says. “I
feel very much in the present.”
That Anand, nearly 30 years
since he was headlined the
“Lightning Kid”, continues to be
at the top of the game and talks
of bringing into the sport millions of children through his
collaboration with the NIIT
Mind Champions venture, is
part of the legacy he avoids
speaking about.
It’s a career that took off in
the 1980s, but was consolidated
over the next decade when
Anand strode into the world of
international chess, the only
question being when, rather
than if, he would be the world’s
best player. The coronation took
time, as the Soviet domination
withered, the World Chess Federation (Fide) split, and Anand
himself had a few strokes of poor
luck. It fell awkwardly into place
first in 2000 with the Fide world
title and finally with his first
unified one in 2007—a long
journey during which the son of
a former railway employee has
remained one of India’s most
admired sportspersons.
His “present” is being the
world’s second highest rated
(2817) chess player, current and
three-time world champion
(2007, 2008, 2010), the country’s
first Grand Master (GM) and the
youngest Indian at 15 to become
an International Master (IM).
His future hinges on how long
he can remain motivated to put
his mind to the 64-square board.
“The motivation is still as strong
as before,” the 42-year-old says,
“but it comes in phases. I can’t
maintain it for long stretches.”
The only two other individual
sportsmen who can compete
with him in defining the 1990s
are cricketer Sachin Tendulkar
and tennis player Leander Paes.
All three men continue to
occupy our consciousness in different ways. Tendulkar, just past
his international debut at the
ridiculous age of 16 in 1989, set
about establishing himself as the
world’s best batsman through
the decade, challenged occasionally by partisan representatives of other countries who
deemed their players to be better (remember Imran Khan calling Inzamam-ul-Haq more talented during the 1992 World
Cup?). Paes’ Olympic bronze
medal in Atlanta in 1996 signalled and promised so much
more. His collection of Grand
Slam doubles titles and the way
he catalysed many Davis Cup
victories with the national flag
gleaming in his often tear-filled
eyes, made him tennis’ best
representative from this country
for years.
But neither Tendulkar nor
Paes were firsts in their sport;
both cricket and tennis have
generations of high achievers.
Chess had practically none, till
the teenager from Chennai
blitzed his way in.
“In the 1980s, I used to search
for Indian names at the bottom
of ratings in chess magazines,”
says Arvind Aaron, chess correspondent for The Hindu,
explaining Anand’s influence.
“Now, I look at the top.”
The 1990s was the decade
when Anand led India, till then

ART

SUBODH GUPTA

the damien
hirst of delhi

y
B Y A NINDITA G HOSE
anindita.g@livemint.com

deprived of world beaters in
individual sport, to believe that
chess, indeed any sport, could
be a career. “Anand was the
driver,” says Aaron, “that
brought sports into newspaper
pages and improved infrastructure. The number of events
increased, as did the number of
entries due to the Anand wave.”
“He proved to Indians that
you could earn a living from
it,” says another GM, Pravin
Thipsay.

The early years
At the lower level of Anand’s
duplex apartment in RA Puram
in Chennai, there are no visible
symbols of his sporting resume.
The cabinet is not filled with trophies and the walls do not adorn
his pictures. There is just one
exotic-looking chessboard in the
living room. The sign outside on
the common apartment wall
merely says Vishy Anand. There
is no army of staff buzzing
about; it’s just a quiet household
in late June attending to the new
addition to the family—Anand
and wife Aruna’s son, Akhil.
The centre of Anand’s attention, the reason why, in stretches
from April, he has not been able
to even think about chess, is too
young to realize his lineage. Had
this been England, betting com-

First with Michael Adams at
the PCA Interzonal tournament
in Groningen; qualifies for the
Fide Candidates cycle

1995

Beats Gata Kamsky in the
Candidates final to qualify for
the world title match; loses to
Garry Kasparov

1997­98

Qualifies to challenge Fide world
champion Anatoly Karpov; loses to
Karpov 0­2 in a rapid play­off after
drawing the regular match 3­3

2000

Beats Alexei Shirov in Tehran
to become the Fide world
chess champion

pany Ladbrokes would have
offered heavy odds on the child
becoming a world-beater by the
time he turns 12. “The odds are
pretty good,” says Anand. “He is
going to have a lot of chances to
learn the game. I don’t know
how far he will take it.”
The “lightning” sobriquet
appears justified even
now—though Anand admits he
is much more measured when
he plays—in the manner he
speaks. His responses to questions come quickly, as he digs
into memories that are over 20
years old. The names of opponents he has faced and periods
of reference are stacked neatly in
the mind that has dominated a
challenging cerebral sport.
Anand’s well-documented rise
to becoming a chess wizard
began when he was 6; as a
14-year-old, he won the national
sub-junior title, then the Asian
Junior Championship (under 19)
in 1985, the World Juniors two
years later. The same year, he
became India’s first GM.
He says winning the Asian
junior and the GM title came at
critical junctures, after classes 10
and 12, respectively, when he
could have faced career decisions. “I was incredibly lucky; at
the best moments, I didn’t have
to worry,” he says.
In the 1980s, sports was not a
career, it was a supplement to a
career, often a ticket to a job in
the public sector. Though Anand
completed his BCom, he knew
all along that he would never
become an accountant. By the
time he finished his final degree
exam, he was ninth in the world.
He narrates an incident during a train journey to Kerala in
the late 1980s, when an elderly
passenger probed him on his
career. When Anand insisted he
played chess for a living, the
passenger asked if Anand’s
father had a business that could
sustain the sportsman’s ambitions. No, I just play chess,
Anand repeated. The gentleman,
who did not recognize his fellow
traveller, retorted that only
Viswanathan Anand could play
chess for a career.
“Now there are (career)
options. If I had told my dad
then that I wanted to be a disc
jockey, he would not have been
approving,” he says, grinning.

A new world
The GM title opened several
doors for him, Anand recollects.
The pre-liberalization restrictions
in getting visas, foreign exchange
and direct flights out of Chennai
now seem strange but India is
less bureaucratic in several prac-

Grand master: Anand says if he had
grown up in the Soviet Union, he would
have had access to better training but
would have had to compete for attention.
tical ways, he says.
Then there was the dominance of the Soviet Union, with
its bulk produce of players who
ruled the sport when this “exotic
man from the Orient”, which
Thipsay says was how Anand
was perceived, started making
dents. Those were days of ambiguity, fed by American maverick
Bobby Fischer’s own conspiracy
theories. “It was a mysterious world for
outsiders,”
remembers
Anand of the
Soviet Union.
“You went there
with the fuzziest
of notions.
Thanks to the
Fischer-Boris
Spassky ruckus,
you believed
every room
was bugged.
The KGB
surely had better things to do
than us!”
Anand’s quest for the
world title had begun in the
early 1990s, though in 1993 it
became more complicated with
Garry Kasparov’s split from the
Fide. After losing to Kasparov in
1995, he lost controversially to
the concurrent Fide champion
Anatoly Karpov, after the latter
was placed directly into the
final. In 2000, Anand beat
Alexey Shirov in Tehran, Iran, to
finally become the Fide world
chess champion.
“The two world champions
concept is an oxymoron; you
cannot have that. You may say
that I won the only title available
and that’s a perfectly valid argument, but there is something
unsatisfactory about the whole
thing,” he says.
It was seven years later that
Anand got the unified title he
wanted, but the movement he
flagged off continues. Three
Indians, K. Sasikiran (world No.
59), P. Harikrishna (76) and Sandipan Chanda (92), are among
the top 100, while D. Harika
became the 25th Indian GM in
July. Anand himself will play
Boris Gelfand, a rare older opponent, in May 2012 in Moscow,
Russia, to defend his title.
This time Anand will have
more to play for than his reputation. “There is a sense already
that I have to do well, though
Akhil is too young, but you feel
he might be watching.”

HE MADE MIDDLE­
CLASS INDIA AN ART
STATEMENT AND
BECAME INDIAN
ART’S GLOBAL FACE

····························
You probably think Subodh Gupta
has been around for longer than
he actually has.
It hasn’t even been 15 years
since India’s most well-known
contemporary artist had his first
international solo exhibition. It
was in 1997 in Bose Pacia in
New York. He had arrived seven
years before that, a penniless art
school graduate from Patna, in
New Delhi.
The free market euphoria was
nascent, but a certain free-spiritedness was already evident in
Indian art. In an orchestrated
Brownian motion, art was moving
to a fourth dimension with “performance” and “installation”. Artists were travelling abroad for art
residencies and shows. Most significantly, a viable market for
Indian art was created when Sotheby’s held its first dedicated auction of Indian art in 1995.
In many ways, Gupta, 47, epitomizes the best and the worst that
liberalization brought about for
Indian art. In 2008, he was the first

to break the $1 million (around
`4.4 crore now) barrier for contemporary Indian art. Though
far apart in scale, his sales records
pegged him the subcontinental
Damien Hirst, the British artist
whose diamond-studded skull
had been valued at $100 million,
and taken the discourse from art
to mart.
When we meet at Gupta’s
sprawling studio-workshop in
Gurgaon, he is the master of his
two-storeyed enterprise. Fibreglass
casts of his iconic installation
Gandhi’s Three Monkeys frame
the front lawn; inside, scale
models of older works take up
corners. Gupta has designed the
avant-garde exposed concrete
and glass exterior of the building
himself. Inside, it gives way to
wood-panelled luxury and statement furniture.
All those years ago, Gupta had
come to New Delhi to seek admission in a master’s programme at
Delhi’s College of Art. “Being in
art school would mean that I had
a place to work,” he says. He was
denied admission but stayed on
with a `1,000 scholarship from the
Lalit Kala Akademi. The youngest
of six children from Khagaul in
Bihar, he was expected to support
himself, but not the family. “I had
a place to sleep, dal, chawal, art
supplies…what else did I need?”
he says.
Urdu activist Kamna Prasad,

POLITICS

YASHWANT
SINHA

who runs the annual Jashn-e-Bahar festival and hails from Patna
as well, showed Gupta the ropes.
She recalls an early episode when
she had introduced Gupta to M.F.
Husain. The senior artist had graciously gone through his work.
Impressed, he’d offered him a job.
Gupta could board with him and
help around with odd jobs while
working on his art. He would be
given a stipend and a scooter.
Gupta had politely declined.
“Husain saab told me later, ‘I’m
going to follow this boy’,” Prasad
recalls. The two artists would cross
paths several times after that,
either at Prasad’s soirées or at
art events. In 1996, in an early
distinction, Gupta received the
first prize at an all-India painting
exhibition held at the Vadehra Art
Gallery in New Delhi. It was
judged by Husain.
Things started changing in the
mid-1990s when Gupta and a
small coterie of artists—including
his artist wife Bharti Kher, who’d
just moved from London to New
Delhi—began to talk about forming an artist’s association; a space
where they could work without
the trappings of the market. In
1997, Gupta and Kher, along with
artists Ajay Desai, Sheila Makhijani, Shukla Sawant and gallerist
Pooja Sood, formed the Khoj
International Artists’ Association.
And it was under the aegis of Khoj
that Gupta produced some of his

Steely determination:
Gupta at his
studio­workshop
in Gurgaon.
most exciting work. Pure (1999), a
performance that had him lying
caked in cow dung in an open
field, referenced India’s obsession
with ritual purity. A year later,
there was Vilas, for which Gupta
posed nude and greased with Vaseline, confronting the camera and
the long sordid history of marketing the Kamasutra.
In comparison with those risque
pursuits, Gupta now toes a more
defined creative line—borrowing
shiny stainless steel utensils and
other articles of daily use in middle-class India to make his signature installations, like This Side is
the Other Side, with milk cans
slung on either side of a Priya
scooter, signalling the old and the
new India. Critics have quietly
snubbed these in recent years as
being formulaic. I ask if he was
worried when he started about
whether he’d be liked, whether
he’d be famous. Gupta responds

in a way that seems to confirm
this. “The beauty of being a young
and struggling artist is that even if
you go wrong, nobody tells you
anything,” he says.
Last year, Gupta collaborated as
scenographer for a ballet staged at
Moscow’s prestigious Bolshoi
Theatre. “I do many things but my
detractors only focus on what they
know,” he says, arms crossed
across his chest. “Think about any
artist whose work you remember.
You remember them because they
created a bold style and believed
in it completely,” says Gupta. “It
took me years to find my ‘formula’. Why should I abandon it?”
Gupta is quick to confess that
he didn’t really study in art school.
His only other training in the arts
had been during his adolescent
years, when he travelled with
Hindi language theatre groups,
both as actor and set designer. “In
five years (in Patna) they taught us

a

B Y A NIL P ADMANABHAN

AJAY AGGARWAL/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Key role: Yashwant Sinha
had three stints as finance
minister.

country, the market became his
bouncing board, and he liked
what it reflected. When we meet,
he is working on a forthcoming
show for London’s Hauser &
Wirth Gallery. It will open “when
he’s ready”.
For Peter Nagy, director, Nature
Morte, what makes Gupta one of
the country’s most important artists is how he straddles rural and
urban contexts with élan and
naivete, bridging the local and the
global for an international context.
The milestones of Gupta’s blazing
success may lie in the new millennium, but the foundations were
laid in the 1990s. The irony is that
while Gupta’s art comments on
the country’s economic growth
and its newfound materialism, he
was a beneficiary of the boom
himself. In its critical depiction of
deficit and excess, his art tells his
own story of a young boy who
went from Khagaul to the globe.

HE WAS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE IDEA
OF ECONOMIC REFORM AND ITS EXECUTION

the reformer
anil.p@livemint.com

what they teach in art preparatory
schools in Europe,” he says. But
awareness of this handicap
affected the way the young Subodh would navigate the world of
contemporary art. “When people
spoke of art history, I had no
idea what was going on,” he
admits. Gupta rose to where he is
today by creating art which was
more visceral; an art born out
of everyday motifs. Yet he was
building upon questions raised
by artists around the world, such
as Marcel Duchamp and the
Viennese actionists.
In 1997, Gupta was awarded the
Gasworks residency in London. An
emerging artist award by Bose
Pacia Modern, New York, came
soon after. There were residencies
and exhibitions in Japan, France,
Australia and South Korea in
quick succession. It’s been a blur
since. In the absence of a valid
critical mechanism for art in the

···························
Arjun Sengupta, economist and
former member of Parliament,
famously dubbed Yashwant
Sinha the “original reformer”. It
is a tag that would baffle most,
especially those fed on the
steady chorus of self-appointed
cheerleaders of Manmohan
Singh, who delivered the epoch
budget of 1991.
The Congress, under the leadership of Rajiv Gandhi, had withdrawn support for the minority
regime headed by prime minister Chandra Shekhar, forcing the
government to opt for an interim
budget in March 1991. Though
constrained, Sinha, then Union
finance minister, had provided
glimpses of the far-reaching
reforms being considered by the
establishment to deal with what
was a full-blown economic crisis
in the making. The key man,
Singh, was an adviser in the
prime minister’s office at the
time and had a bird’s-eye view
of what was unravelling.
It laid down the principles—the need for fiscal discipline, including targeting and
cutting subsidies, introducing the
concept of fiscal deficit as the
metric to measure fiscal disci-

pline and divestment of up to
25% of equity from select public
sector undertakings—which
formed the basis of the benchmark budget presented later in
July by Singh.
Popular history, especially the
first draft recorded by the media,
has somehow glossed over this
fact; just as it has made the
assumption that reforms were
jump-started in 1991. So untrue.
They had been in the making
since 1980 when India, under
prime minister Indira Gandhi
and Union finance minister
Pranab Mukherjee, took the
country’s first structural adjustment loan from the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). Throughout the 1970s, the efficacy of
industrial licensing had been
questioned; it finally started to
give way in bits and pieces—or
what is referred to as reforms by
stealth—from the early 1980s,
when the IMF loan kicked in.
Viewed thus, it is also evident
that Sinha was the vital missing
link that helps us understand
that the transformation from a
controlled economy was gradual,
over 30 years, and not abrupt.
This slight has always irked
Sinha, and has been articulated
in a tell-all biography of his years
at the helm in North Block (Con-

fessions of a Swadeshi Reformer,
published in 2007). Understandable for someone who made it in
the murky world of Indian politics without any established pedigree or familial connections,
and went on to be the first nonCongress finance minister to
present five Union budgets.

The accidental FM
Sinha had come close to quitting
the Indian Administrative Service
(IAS) seven years after he joined
the service in 1960. This was
after a run-in the young district
collector had with the then chief
minister of Bihar, M.P. Sinha. He
approached Jayaprakash
Narayan, the social reformer and
his idol, for counselling.
Convinced that it was too
early in his career, Narayan
advised Sinha against joining
politics. However, 17 years later,
he took the plunge and quit the
IAS, 12 years prematurely. Mentored by Chandra Shekhar, he
joined the Janata Dal headed by
V.P. Singh.
This relationship did not last
and Sinha moved out of the
party to form another faction of
the Janata Dal with his mentor.
Chandra Shekhar became the
prime minister in November
1990 with outside support from

the Congress. Sinha’s preferred
choice was the external affairs
portfolio. The PM felt otherwise:
enter India’s new finance minister. He would have three stints
in the finance ministry, including
one in 1998 and another for
three years from 1999. They all
had a common theme: crisis.

The crisis man
In 1991, the country’s balance
of payments crisis worsened so
dramatically that it was at risk
of a sovereign default. To avoid
a default, it was decided to
mortgage 20 tonnes of gold with
the Bank of England to raise
$400 million (around `1,800
crore now). It was a politically
tough decision: akin to mortgaging the family silver. Sinha
says this decision haunted him
for the next 10 years, with political opposition always targeting
him for the deed. “It was my
most important achievement to
prevent India from defaulting
on its foreign loan commitments,” he recalls.
His next stint, in 1998, was as
a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the leader of the
National Democratic Alliance
(NDA). Not only was India
recovering from the currency
meltdown in South-East Asia in
September 1997, its decision to
go in for nuclear tests invited
global economic sanctions. Once
again, the country’s foreign currency reserves were under siege,
provoking Sinha to launch the

Resurgent India Bonds in August
1998—they raised $4.3 billion.
A year later, with the NDA facing a fresh election challenge
after losing a vote of confidence
in Parliament, the country was
caught up in another conflict
with Pakistan in Kargil. Sinha’s
third stint in office happened
against this backdrop; and, then,
the crisis involving the Unit Trust
of India. “Not one (budget) year
was a normal year,” Sinha says.

The EMI revolution
If there is one thing the middle
class has loved about economic
reforms it is the unbridled access
to consumer goods—at least till
resurgent inflation started eating

into this dream over the last two
years. This was made possible by
Sinha’s politically bold decision
to reduce administered interest
rates—read this as those guaranteed on Provident Fund investments and small savings.
Between January 1999 and
March 2002, this rate was
reduced from 14.5% to 10.5%;
this was reduced further to 9.5%
by Jaswant Singh, who succeeded Sinha.
This led to the softening of the
interest rate regime and created
the basis for the consumer credit
revolution that was to follow in
the new millennium. Alongside,
Sinha introduced tax breaks on
loans for housing.
These two measures triggered
an unprecedented investment
boom in the real estate sector.
Overnight the investor profile
turned youthful, stoking aspirations. As Sinha puts it, “There
was a mindset change from saving and buying (an asset) to buying and saving.”

Institutional reforms
By the time Sinha returned to
North Block in 1998, the economy was recovering from the crisis. The difference from 1991 was
that this reform was not happening due to desperation; it was
through a modicum of consensus. The effort to dismantle the
stodgy tax structures began in
1991, but was accelerated in the
mid-1990s.
A logical next step was introduction of the value added tax
(VAT). Since the participation of
states was critical, Sinha set up
an empowered group of finance
ministers that has endured and
is now playing another pivotal

MILESTONES

1996

Wins first prize in an all­India
painting exhibition at the
Vadehra Art Gallery, judged
by M.F. Husain

1997

Awarded the Unesco­Aschberg
residency at Gasworks, London;
wins Emerging Artist Award, Bose
Pacia Modern, New York. Has his
first international solo exhibition in
New York

role in preparing the country for
the final stage of indirect tax
reforms—introduction of a single
goods and services tax.
Sinha also set up the National
Statistical Commission under the
chairmanship of former RBI governor C. Rangarajan; eventually,
this led to the creation of an
independent statistical authority.
The decision to bring the country’s regulatory system up to
speed with the rest of the world
through a new competition policy was also initiated by him.
Eventually, the Competition Act
was notified in January 2003 and
the Competition Commission in
October of the same year.

The outsider
Despite these accomplishments,
Sinha never got his due. He was
shunted out midway through his
third stint in North Block—a
moment he recalls with disappointment: “As Mr (Atal Bihari)
Vajpayee told me, you have
done good work in finance. But
the perception does not match.”
It is not surprising that in a
party with an overt Hindutva tilt,
Sinha, with his socialist roots,
would have been out of place.
It only hurts that much
more—the party’s subtle rejection rankled and popular history
has ignored Sinha’s legacy.
Looking back, would he rather
have gone the populist route and
avoided unpleasant decisions?
“Will I make that same mistake again? No!”
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PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

CHESS

VISWANATHAN
ANAND

HIS RISE THROUGH THE 1990s NOT
ONLY ESTABLISHED HIS GENIUS, BUT
ALSO SPAWNED A GENERATION

star of the orient

GERD SCHEEWEL/BONGARTS/GETTY IMAGES

B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN

i

arun.j@livemint.com

···························
Is this at gunpoint?” Viswanathan Anand wants to know
when asked whether he has ever
thought about his legacy. It’s a
subject he would rather not talk
about, for “your legacy should be
written by others, preferably
when you are gone,” he says. “I
feel very much in the present.”
That Anand, nearly 30 years
since he was headlined the
“Lightning Kid”, continues to be
at the top of the game and talks
of bringing into the sport millions of children through his
collaboration with the NIIT
Mind Champions venture, is
part of the legacy he avoids
speaking about.
It’s a career that took off in
the 1980s, but was consolidated
over the next decade when
Anand strode into the world of
international chess, the only
question being when, rather
than if, he would be the world’s
best player. The coronation took
time, as the Soviet domination
withered, the World Chess Federation (Fide) split, and Anand
himself had a few strokes of poor
luck. It fell awkwardly into place
first in 2000 with the Fide world
title and finally with his first
unified one in 2007—a long
journey during which the son of
a former railway employee has
remained one of India’s most
admired sportspersons.
His “present” is being the
world’s second highest rated
(2817) chess player, current and
three-time world champion
(2007, 2008, 2010), the country’s
first Grand Master (GM) and the
youngest Indian at 15 to become
an International Master (IM).
His future hinges on how long
he can remain motivated to put
his mind to the 64-square board.
“The motivation is still as strong
as before,” the 42-year-old says,
“but it comes in phases. I can’t
maintain it for long stretches.”
The only two other individual
sportsmen who can compete
with him in defining the 1990s
are cricketer Sachin Tendulkar
and tennis player Leander Paes.
All three men continue to
occupy our consciousness in different ways. Tendulkar, just past
his international debut at the
ridiculous age of 16 in 1989, set
about establishing himself as the
world’s best batsman through
the decade, challenged occasionally by partisan representatives of other countries who
deemed their players to be better (remember Imran Khan calling Inzamam-ul-Haq more talented during the 1992 World
Cup?). Paes’ Olympic bronze
medal in Atlanta in 1996 signalled and promised so much
more. His collection of Grand
Slam doubles titles and the way
he catalysed many Davis Cup
victories with the national flag
gleaming in his often tear-filled
eyes, made him tennis’ best
representative from this country
for years.
But neither Tendulkar nor
Paes were firsts in their sport;
both cricket and tennis have
generations of high achievers.
Chess had practically none, till
the teenager from Chennai
blitzed his way in.
“In the 1980s, I used to search
for Indian names at the bottom
of ratings in chess magazines,”
says Arvind Aaron, chess correspondent for The Hindu,
explaining Anand’s influence.
“Now, I look at the top.”
The 1990s was the decade
when Anand led India, till then

ART

SUBODH GUPTA

the damien
hirst of delhi

y
B Y A NINDITA G HOSE
anindita.g@livemint.com

deprived of world beaters in
individual sport, to believe that
chess, indeed any sport, could
be a career. “Anand was the
driver,” says Aaron, “that
brought sports into newspaper
pages and improved infrastructure. The number of events
increased, as did the number of
entries due to the Anand wave.”
“He proved to Indians that
you could earn a living from
it,” says another GM, Pravin
Thipsay.

The early years
At the lower level of Anand’s
duplex apartment in RA Puram
in Chennai, there are no visible
symbols of his sporting resume.
The cabinet is not filled with trophies and the walls do not adorn
his pictures. There is just one
exotic-looking chessboard in the
living room. The sign outside on
the common apartment wall
merely says Vishy Anand. There
is no army of staff buzzing
about; it’s just a quiet household
in late June attending to the new
addition to the family—Anand
and wife Aruna’s son, Akhil.
The centre of Anand’s attention, the reason why, in stretches
from April, he has not been able
to even think about chess, is too
young to realize his lineage. Had
this been England, betting com-

First with Michael Adams at
the PCA Interzonal tournament
in Groningen; qualifies for the
Fide Candidates cycle

1995

Beats Gata Kamsky in the
Candidates final to qualify for
the world title match; loses to
Garry Kasparov

1997­98

Qualifies to challenge Fide world
champion Anatoly Karpov; loses to
Karpov 0­2 in a rapid play­off after
drawing the regular match 3­3

2000

Beats Alexei Shirov in Tehran
to become the Fide world
chess champion

pany Ladbrokes would have
offered heavy odds on the child
becoming a world-beater by the
time he turns 12. “The odds are
pretty good,” says Anand. “He is
going to have a lot of chances to
learn the game. I don’t know
how far he will take it.”
The “lightning” sobriquet
appears justified even
now—though Anand admits he
is much more measured when
he plays—in the manner he
speaks. His responses to questions come quickly, as he digs
into memories that are over 20
years old. The names of opponents he has faced and periods
of reference are stacked neatly in
the mind that has dominated a
challenging cerebral sport.
Anand’s well-documented rise
to becoming a chess wizard
began when he was 6; as a
14-year-old, he won the national
sub-junior title, then the Asian
Junior Championship (under 19)
in 1985, the World Juniors two
years later. The same year, he
became India’s first GM.
He says winning the Asian
junior and the GM title came at
critical junctures, after classes 10
and 12, respectively, when he
could have faced career decisions. “I was incredibly lucky; at
the best moments, I didn’t have
to worry,” he says.
In the 1980s, sports was not a
career, it was a supplement to a
career, often a ticket to a job in
the public sector. Though Anand
completed his BCom, he knew
all along that he would never
become an accountant. By the
time he finished his final degree
exam, he was ninth in the world.
He narrates an incident during a train journey to Kerala in
the late 1980s, when an elderly
passenger probed him on his
career. When Anand insisted he
played chess for a living, the
passenger asked if Anand’s
father had a business that could
sustain the sportsman’s ambitions. No, I just play chess,
Anand repeated. The gentleman,
who did not recognize his fellow
traveller, retorted that only
Viswanathan Anand could play
chess for a career.
“Now there are (career)
options. If I had told my dad
then that I wanted to be a disc
jockey, he would not have been
approving,” he says, grinning.

A new world
The GM title opened several
doors for him, Anand recollects.
The pre-liberalization restrictions
in getting visas, foreign exchange
and direct flights out of Chennai
now seem strange but India is
less bureaucratic in several prac-

Grand master: Anand says if he had
grown up in the Soviet Union, he would
have had access to better training but
would have had to compete for attention.
tical ways, he says.
Then there was the dominance of the Soviet Union, with
its bulk produce of players who
ruled the sport when this “exotic
man from the Orient”, which
Thipsay says was how Anand
was perceived, started making
dents. Those were days of ambiguity, fed by American maverick
Bobby Fischer’s own conspiracy
theories. “It was a mysterious world for
outsiders,”
remembers
Anand of the
Soviet Union.
“You went there
with the fuzziest
of notions.
Thanks to the
Fischer-Boris
Spassky ruckus,
you believed
every room
was bugged.
The KGB
surely had better things to do
than us!”
Anand’s quest for the
world title had begun in the
early 1990s, though in 1993 it
became more complicated with
Garry Kasparov’s split from the
Fide. After losing to Kasparov in
1995, he lost controversially to
the concurrent Fide champion
Anatoly Karpov, after the latter
was placed directly into the
final. In 2000, Anand beat
Alexey Shirov in Tehran, Iran, to
finally become the Fide world
chess champion.
“The two world champions
concept is an oxymoron; you
cannot have that. You may say
that I won the only title available
and that’s a perfectly valid argument, but there is something
unsatisfactory about the whole
thing,” he says.
It was seven years later that
Anand got the unified title he
wanted, but the movement he
flagged off continues. Three
Indians, K. Sasikiran (world No.
59), P. Harikrishna (76) and Sandipan Chanda (92), are among
the top 100, while D. Harika
became the 25th Indian GM in
July. Anand himself will play
Boris Gelfand, a rare older opponent, in May 2012 in Moscow,
Russia, to defend his title.
This time Anand will have
more to play for than his reputation. “There is a sense already
that I have to do well, though
Akhil is too young, but you feel
he might be watching.”

HE MADE MIDDLE­
CLASS INDIA AN ART
STATEMENT AND
BECAME INDIAN
ART’S GLOBAL FACE

····························
You probably think Subodh Gupta
has been around for longer than
he actually has.
It hasn’t even been 15 years
since India’s most well-known
contemporary artist had his first
international solo exhibition. It
was in 1997 in Bose Pacia in
New York. He had arrived seven
years before that, a penniless art
school graduate from Patna, in
New Delhi.
The free market euphoria was
nascent, but a certain free-spiritedness was already evident in
Indian art. In an orchestrated
Brownian motion, art was moving
to a fourth dimension with “performance” and “installation”. Artists were travelling abroad for art
residencies and shows. Most significantly, a viable market for
Indian art was created when Sotheby’s held its first dedicated auction of Indian art in 1995.
In many ways, Gupta, 47, epitomizes the best and the worst that
liberalization brought about for
Indian art. In 2008, he was the first

to break the $1 million (around
`4.4 crore now) barrier for contemporary Indian art. Though
far apart in scale, his sales records
pegged him the subcontinental
Damien Hirst, the British artist
whose diamond-studded skull
had been valued at $100 million,
and taken the discourse from art
to mart.
When we meet at Gupta’s
sprawling studio-workshop in
Gurgaon, he is the master of his
two-storeyed enterprise. Fibreglass
casts of his iconic installation
Gandhi’s Three Monkeys frame
the front lawn; inside, scale
models of older works take up
corners. Gupta has designed the
avant-garde exposed concrete
and glass exterior of the building
himself. Inside, it gives way to
wood-panelled luxury and statement furniture.
All those years ago, Gupta had
come to New Delhi to seek admission in a master’s programme at
Delhi’s College of Art. “Being in
art school would mean that I had
a place to work,” he says. He was
denied admission but stayed on
with a `1,000 scholarship from the
Lalit Kala Akademi. The youngest
of six children from Khagaul in
Bihar, he was expected to support
himself, but not the family. “I had
a place to sleep, dal, chawal, art
supplies…what else did I need?”
he says.
Urdu activist Kamna Prasad,

POLITICS

YASHWANT
SINHA

who runs the annual Jashn-e-Bahar festival and hails from Patna
as well, showed Gupta the ropes.
She recalls an early episode when
she had introduced Gupta to M.F.
Husain. The senior artist had graciously gone through his work.
Impressed, he’d offered him a job.
Gupta could board with him and
help around with odd jobs while
working on his art. He would be
given a stipend and a scooter.
Gupta had politely declined.
“Husain saab told me later, ‘I’m
going to follow this boy’,” Prasad
recalls. The two artists would cross
paths several times after that,
either at Prasad’s soirées or at
art events. In 1996, in an early
distinction, Gupta received the
first prize at an all-India painting
exhibition held at the Vadehra Art
Gallery in New Delhi. It was
judged by Husain.
Things started changing in the
mid-1990s when Gupta and a
small coterie of artists—including
his artist wife Bharti Kher, who’d
just moved from London to New
Delhi—began to talk about forming an artist’s association; a space
where they could work without
the trappings of the market. In
1997, Gupta and Kher, along with
artists Ajay Desai, Sheila Makhijani, Shukla Sawant and gallerist
Pooja Sood, formed the Khoj
International Artists’ Association.
And it was under the aegis of Khoj
that Gupta produced some of his

Steely determination:
Gupta at his
studio­workshop
in Gurgaon.
most exciting work. Pure (1999), a
performance that had him lying
caked in cow dung in an open
field, referenced India’s obsession
with ritual purity. A year later,
there was Vilas, for which Gupta
posed nude and greased with Vaseline, confronting the camera and
the long sordid history of marketing the Kamasutra.
In comparison with those risque
pursuits, Gupta now toes a more
defined creative line—borrowing
shiny stainless steel utensils and
other articles of daily use in middle-class India to make his signature installations, like This Side is
the Other Side, with milk cans
slung on either side of a Priya
scooter, signalling the old and the
new India. Critics have quietly
snubbed these in recent years as
being formulaic. I ask if he was
worried when he started about
whether he’d be liked, whether
he’d be famous. Gupta responds

in a way that seems to confirm
this. “The beauty of being a young
and struggling artist is that even if
you go wrong, nobody tells you
anything,” he says.
Last year, Gupta collaborated as
scenographer for a ballet staged at
Moscow’s prestigious Bolshoi
Theatre. “I do many things but my
detractors only focus on what they
know,” he says, arms crossed
across his chest. “Think about any
artist whose work you remember.
You remember them because they
created a bold style and believed
in it completely,” says Gupta. “It
took me years to find my ‘formula’. Why should I abandon it?”
Gupta is quick to confess that
he didn’t really study in art school.
His only other training in the arts
had been during his adolescent
years, when he travelled with
Hindi language theatre groups,
both as actor and set designer. “In
five years (in Patna) they taught us

a

B Y A NIL P ADMANABHAN

AJAY AGGARWAL/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Key role: Yashwant Sinha
had three stints as finance
minister.

country, the market became his
bouncing board, and he liked
what it reflected. When we meet,
he is working on a forthcoming
show for London’s Hauser &
Wirth Gallery. It will open “when
he’s ready”.
For Peter Nagy, director, Nature
Morte, what makes Gupta one of
the country’s most important artists is how he straddles rural and
urban contexts with élan and
naivete, bridging the local and the
global for an international context.
The milestones of Gupta’s blazing
success may lie in the new millennium, but the foundations were
laid in the 1990s. The irony is that
while Gupta’s art comments on
the country’s economic growth
and its newfound materialism, he
was a beneficiary of the boom
himself. In its critical depiction of
deficit and excess, his art tells his
own story of a young boy who
went from Khagaul to the globe.

HE WAS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE IDEA
OF ECONOMIC REFORM AND ITS EXECUTION

the reformer
anil.p@livemint.com

what they teach in art preparatory
schools in Europe,” he says. But
awareness of this handicap
affected the way the young Subodh would navigate the world of
contemporary art. “When people
spoke of art history, I had no
idea what was going on,” he
admits. Gupta rose to where he is
today by creating art which was
more visceral; an art born out
of everyday motifs. Yet he was
building upon questions raised
by artists around the world, such
as Marcel Duchamp and the
Viennese actionists.
In 1997, Gupta was awarded the
Gasworks residency in London. An
emerging artist award by Bose
Pacia Modern, New York, came
soon after. There were residencies
and exhibitions in Japan, France,
Australia and South Korea in
quick succession. It’s been a blur
since. In the absence of a valid
critical mechanism for art in the

···························
Arjun Sengupta, economist and
former member of Parliament,
famously dubbed Yashwant
Sinha the “original reformer”. It
is a tag that would baffle most,
especially those fed on the
steady chorus of self-appointed
cheerleaders of Manmohan
Singh, who delivered the epoch
budget of 1991.
The Congress, under the leadership of Rajiv Gandhi, had withdrawn support for the minority
regime headed by prime minister Chandra Shekhar, forcing the
government to opt for an interim
budget in March 1991. Though
constrained, Sinha, then Union
finance minister, had provided
glimpses of the far-reaching
reforms being considered by the
establishment to deal with what
was a full-blown economic crisis
in the making. The key man,
Singh, was an adviser in the
prime minister’s office at the
time and had a bird’s-eye view
of what was unravelling.
It laid down the principles—the need for fiscal discipline, including targeting and
cutting subsidies, introducing the
concept of fiscal deficit as the
metric to measure fiscal disci-

pline and divestment of up to
25% of equity from select public
sector undertakings—which
formed the basis of the benchmark budget presented later in
July by Singh.
Popular history, especially the
first draft recorded by the media,
has somehow glossed over this
fact; just as it has made the
assumption that reforms were
jump-started in 1991. So untrue.
They had been in the making
since 1980 when India, under
prime minister Indira Gandhi
and Union finance minister
Pranab Mukherjee, took the
country’s first structural adjustment loan from the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). Throughout the 1970s, the efficacy of
industrial licensing had been
questioned; it finally started to
give way in bits and pieces—or
what is referred to as reforms by
stealth—from the early 1980s,
when the IMF loan kicked in.
Viewed thus, it is also evident
that Sinha was the vital missing
link that helps us understand
that the transformation from a
controlled economy was gradual,
over 30 years, and not abrupt.
This slight has always irked
Sinha, and has been articulated
in a tell-all biography of his years
at the helm in North Block (Con-

fessions of a Swadeshi Reformer,
published in 2007). Understandable for someone who made it in
the murky world of Indian politics without any established pedigree or familial connections,
and went on to be the first nonCongress finance minister to
present five Union budgets.

The accidental FM
Sinha had come close to quitting
the Indian Administrative Service
(IAS) seven years after he joined
the service in 1960. This was
after a run-in the young district
collector had with the then chief
minister of Bihar, M.P. Sinha. He
approached Jayaprakash
Narayan, the social reformer and
his idol, for counselling.
Convinced that it was too
early in his career, Narayan
advised Sinha against joining
politics. However, 17 years later,
he took the plunge and quit the
IAS, 12 years prematurely. Mentored by Chandra Shekhar, he
joined the Janata Dal headed by
V.P. Singh.
This relationship did not last
and Sinha moved out of the
party to form another faction of
the Janata Dal with his mentor.
Chandra Shekhar became the
prime minister in November
1990 with outside support from

the Congress. Sinha’s preferred
choice was the external affairs
portfolio. The PM felt otherwise:
enter India’s new finance minister. He would have three stints
in the finance ministry, including
one in 1998 and another for
three years from 1999. They all
had a common theme: crisis.

The crisis man
In 1991, the country’s balance
of payments crisis worsened so
dramatically that it was at risk
of a sovereign default. To avoid
a default, it was decided to
mortgage 20 tonnes of gold with
the Bank of England to raise
$400 million (around `1,800
crore now). It was a politically
tough decision: akin to mortgaging the family silver. Sinha
says this decision haunted him
for the next 10 years, with political opposition always targeting
him for the deed. “It was my
most important achievement to
prevent India from defaulting
on its foreign loan commitments,” he recalls.
His next stint, in 1998, was as
a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the leader of the
National Democratic Alliance
(NDA). Not only was India
recovering from the currency
meltdown in South-East Asia in
September 1997, its decision to
go in for nuclear tests invited
global economic sanctions. Once
again, the country’s foreign currency reserves were under siege,
provoking Sinha to launch the

Resurgent India Bonds in August
1998—they raised $4.3 billion.
A year later, with the NDA facing a fresh election challenge
after losing a vote of confidence
in Parliament, the country was
caught up in another conflict
with Pakistan in Kargil. Sinha’s
third stint in office happened
against this backdrop; and, then,
the crisis involving the Unit Trust
of India. “Not one (budget) year
was a normal year,” Sinha says.

The EMI revolution
If there is one thing the middle
class has loved about economic
reforms it is the unbridled access
to consumer goods—at least till
resurgent inflation started eating

into this dream over the last two
years. This was made possible by
Sinha’s politically bold decision
to reduce administered interest
rates—read this as those guaranteed on Provident Fund investments and small savings.
Between January 1999 and
March 2002, this rate was
reduced from 14.5% to 10.5%;
this was reduced further to 9.5%
by Jaswant Singh, who succeeded Sinha.
This led to the softening of the
interest rate regime and created
the basis for the consumer credit
revolution that was to follow in
the new millennium. Alongside,
Sinha introduced tax breaks on
loans for housing.
These two measures triggered
an unprecedented investment
boom in the real estate sector.
Overnight the investor profile
turned youthful, stoking aspirations. As Sinha puts it, “There
was a mindset change from saving and buying (an asset) to buying and saving.”

Institutional reforms
By the time Sinha returned to
North Block in 1998, the economy was recovering from the crisis. The difference from 1991 was
that this reform was not happening due to desperation; it was
through a modicum of consensus. The effort to dismantle the
stodgy tax structures began in
1991, but was accelerated in the
mid-1990s.
A logical next step was introduction of the value added tax
(VAT). Since the participation of
states was critical, Sinha set up
an empowered group of finance
ministers that has endured and
is now playing another pivotal

MILESTONES

1996

Wins first prize in an all­India
painting exhibition at the
Vadehra Art Gallery, judged
by M.F. Husain

1997

Awarded the Unesco­Aschberg
residency at Gasworks, London;
wins Emerging Artist Award, Bose
Pacia Modern, New York. Has his
first international solo exhibition in
New York

role in preparing the country for
the final stage of indirect tax
reforms—introduction of a single
goods and services tax.
Sinha also set up the National
Statistical Commission under the
chairmanship of former RBI governor C. Rangarajan; eventually,
this led to the creation of an
independent statistical authority.
The decision to bring the country’s regulatory system up to
speed with the rest of the world
through a new competition policy was also initiated by him.
Eventually, the Competition Act
was notified in January 2003 and
the Competition Commission in
October of the same year.

The outsider
Despite these accomplishments,
Sinha never got his due. He was
shunted out midway through his
third stint in North Block—a
moment he recalls with disappointment: “As Mr (Atal Bihari)
Vajpayee told me, you have
done good work in finance. But
the perception does not match.”
It is not surprising that in a
party with an overt Hindutva tilt,
Sinha, with his socialist roots,
would have been out of place.
It only hurts that much
more—the party’s subtle rejection rankled and popular history
has ignored Sinha’s legacy.
Looking back, would he rather
have gone the populist route and
avoided unpleasant decisions?
“Will I make that same mistake again? No!”
www.livemint.com
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INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

HOMOSEXUALITY

MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

the start of
a revolution
MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI/MINT

THE INDIAN GAY
COMMUNITY
FOUND SPACE IN
MUMBAI’S VOODOO
PUB AND DELHI’S
PEGS N PINTS,
‘BOMBAY DOST’ WAS
BORN AND PENGUIN
PUBLISHED A GAY
ANTHOLOGY

l
Such a long journey:
(top) Participants at
Delhi’s second gay
pride parade in 2009;
and A. Husain (left)
with his boyfriend.

“Looking for chubby bottoms.”
“Looking for good-looking,
straight-acting guys.” “Looking for
discreet friendship and fun.”
“Looking for a real and honest
man.” “Looking for sex with hairy
men.” On a recent Sunday
morning, these were the status
messages of five of the 131 people
in Delhi who were cruising for
men on the international gay
dating website Guys4men.com,
popularly called PlanetRomeo.
Started in Germany in 2002,
PlanetRomeo’s impact on the
lives of homosexual men in
India’s big cities has been more
lasting than the Delhi high court
verdict in 2009 that legalized gay
sex among consenting adults. The
website has given people access
to other homosexuals without
compromising their identity or
safety and has 73,000 members in
India. “Whether you are in Delhi,
Mumbai or Bangalore,
PlanetRomeo is the place to be
at,” says a Mumbai-based
investment banker who writes a
blog called Johnny Gaydar
(Johnnygaydar.blogspot.com)
under the name Rajeev. In his
late 20s, Rajeev says the Internet
has changed the lives of gay
people. “I see 18- to 19-year-olds
confidently putting up their
photos and listing their
preferences,” he says. “While
growing up in the 1990s, I was
confused and ashamed.
There was no way to find
like-minded people.”
The 1990s was the decade of
quiet consolidation of the gay
community networks, and the
action began in Mumbai. “Those
were the years when Indian
middle-class gay men started to
find spaces where they could feel
safe from the harassment by the
police and goonda elements,
since sodomy was a criminal
offence,” says Ashok Row Kavi,
co-founder of Bombay Dost,
India’s first gay magazine.
Today there are sites and blogs
dedicated to discussing Indian

male nudity. YouTube has
channels devoted to similar
videos, with some people posting
their own nude and semi-nude
videos freely.
The Internet tells only a part of
the story in the coming-of-age of
gay life in India. In Delhi, the
PlanetRomeo website has 9,000
members, followed by Mumbai
with 7,000 men. The much
smaller city of Lucknow has 600
members, and Gorakhpur, deep
in the Hindi heartland, has 46.
A face in these statistics,
27-year-old A. Husain, a PhD
student at Delhi’s Jawaharlal
Nehru University (JNU), has lived
through the changes that have
partially transformed the lives of
gay men, at least in metropolitan
India. A native of Mauritius, he
moved to the Capital seven years
ago. “I’m not an Indian,” he says,
“but I grew up here intellectually
and emotionally, and my life’s
most important relationship was
formed with a Sikh man from
Punjab.” Husain chose to study
in Delhi because of his Indian
boyfriend whom he first met
through Yahoo Messenger. It was
2004, the year Facebook was
launched. The friends had no
access to photo-processing
software, so no pictures were
exchanged. “I only knew
that being a Sikh, he
had long hair and a
beard and so I moved
to India,” says Husain.
He joined Delhi
University’s Khalsa College
as a graduate student. The
boyfriend was a medical student
in Amritsar, a city 450km north of
Delhi. The online interactions
were infrequent and depended
on the availability of empty
terminals in Internet cafés; the
lovers wrote letters and chatted
on landline phones.
Then, as in the 1990s, the gay
social life in cities like Delhi and
Mumbai was limited to private
parties and cruising in seedier
sections of public parks. In

Mumbai, the club where men
could hang out together was
Voodoo pub in Colaba on
Saturday nights. In Delhi, it was
Tuesday nights at Pegs N Pints
(recently renamed Peppers),
Chanakyapuri. Every evening a
few of Delhi’s gay
people—diplomats, designers,
doctors, students—gathered
in Nehru Park, near the
Prime Minister’s bungalow.
In Mumbai, the popular
cruising area was “The
Wall”, the waterfront
avenue that runs
parallel to the Taj
Mahal Hotel. The
beaches at Juhu and
Chowpatty were
also popular with
cruisers. In
Amritsar, it was as

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

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INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP

MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI/MINT

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Public acceptance: (clockwise
from above, left) A scene
from the gay pride event
held in Bangalore last year
to celebrate the first
anniversary of the Delhi
high court verdict that
decriminalized gay sex; the
verdict being celebrated at
Jantar Mantar, New Delhi,
in 2009; the website
PlanetRomeo; and the park
above Palika Bazar parking
in Connaught Place, New
Delhi, which teems every
evening with gay men.

if gay people did not exist.
Every month Husain took the
Shatabdi Express to Amritsar to
spend a weekend with his
boyfriend. They would book a
hotel room. Later they would go
to the Golden Temple, sit by the
holy pond, and listen to Gurbani,
the Sikh devotional hymns. By
10pm, the boyfriend had
returned home to his parents
and Husain spent the night alone
in the hotel room. Next morning
the boyfriend would return. They
would check out of the hotel and
before catching the Shatabdi
back to Delhi, Husain and his
lover dined at Pizza Hut on
Lawrence Road.
The sexual love between a man
and a man, or a woman and a
woman, is not a Western import
to India. “While researching for
our book,” says Saleem Kidwai,
the co-author of Same-Sex Love
in India: Readings from Literature
and History, “we discovered that
attraction between two people of
the same gender had been
discussed for thousands of years
in dozens of Indian languages.”
But the concept of a discrete
identity and lifestyle was initially
embraced more in the West. As
Kavi says, “The social identity as
a homosexual based around
same sex desires was an idea
from the West and it started
crystallizing in India during the
1970s in Mumbai.”
In 1990, Kavi and three of his
friends started Bombay Dost as a
registered newsletter with no clue
on how to distribute it. The first
copy was priced at `50 and had
16 pages. The cover had a “vision
statement” that called the
community to unite. Six hundred
copies were printed. The first
copies are now rare, with three in
the US Library of Congress in
Washington, DC. The magazine
was sold through gay groups in
Mumbai and other bigger cities,
and was distributed out of
a one-room office on the
mezzanine floor of a “businesses

centre” run by a Sindhi
entrepreneur and his two Catholic
secretaries in Bandra West’s
Veena Beena shopping centre.
“The magazine’s second issue
had the first article on what
Section 377 of the Indian Penal
Code meant for gay men. It was
by criminal lawyer Shrikant Bhat.
The first issue had the first article
on how HIV was a health hazard
for the community,” says Kavi.
In April 1994, the magazine’s
three-man editorial board
registered a NGO for gay men’s
health called The Humsafar Trust
in Mumbai. Kavi asked the
municipal corporation of Greater
Bombay to give him a space in a
bazaar to run a helpline and
counselling centre for gay men
and others. Situated in the
suburban Vakola Market, the trust
started paying rent to the city’s
local government then ruled by
the right-wing party Shiv Sena.
In the early 1990s, the HIV
epidemic, which was first
detected in the US in the 1980s,
started raising its head in India,
though the first case was
reported in 1989 in Mumbai. As
in the US, three of the most
vulnerable groups were men
who had sex with men (MSM),
IV (intravenous therapy) users
and female sex workers. In 1994,
Humsafar Trust convened the
first conference of gay men on
the campus of Mumbai’s SNDT
Women’s University to discuss
why gay men in India might be
more susceptible to AIDS. It was
inaugurated by Subhash
Salunkhe, the director general of
health services in Maharashtra.
Nearly a hundred men attended.
During the press conference,
many delegates were crying as
they recounted their lives in the
closet, describing harassment
by family, the police and
criminal elements.
In 1995-96, Humsafar
gathered data, in collaboration
with the Pune-based National
Institute of Virology, which

showed that HIV was already in
the community. It caused alarm.
The community members
started street counselling in
Mumbai, giving information on
HIV and AIDS and where to go
for testing. In 1996, condoms
started being distributed in the
city’s gay parties.
In the 1970s, Mumbai’s first gay
parties took place in the
bungalows of globe-trolling rich
men in upper-crust
neighbourhoods like Malabar Hill,
Juhu, Peddar Road and Colaba.
Mostly businessmen, corporate
executives and expats, these
privileged people invited men
only from their social set. By the
1980s, the party scene became
democratized. “Some of us who
had access to the private parties
wondered why a few people
should have control over who
should attend such bashes,
especially since poorer gay men
were turned away by snooty rich
gay guys,” says Kavi, who was
then a journalist in Mumbai. The
city’s first ticketed gay
party—open to anyone who could
pay `80—took place in 1984 on
the rooftop of Hotel Meghdoot in
middle-class Ghatkopar. Since
section 377 of the Indian Penal
Code criminalized homosexual
sex, there was always a fear of the
police arresting the party crowd.
The bashes were therefore
publicized as “special parties” or
“stags”. Sometimes there would
be a cake. If the police arrived, it
was shown as evidence of an
innocent birthday bash.
While at Khalsa College,
Husain kept his sexual identity a
secret. “People joked about gay
men. They still do but it’s less,”
he says, sitting at a café in
Delhi’s Green Park Market.
Husain is dressed in blue
skin-tight T-shirt and black
body-fit jeans. His eyebrows are
threaded and his nails are
manicured. He is carrying a large
brown handbag. “Now, being gay
is more acceptable. It’s almost

fashionable. Sometimes we are
passed off as frivolous because
most of us are so careful about
our grooming, unlike straight
men.” Husain occasionally went
on Tuesday nights to Pegs N
Pints, then the only place in
Delhi for gay men to dance
together. “Off and on, there
would be farmhouse parties in
south Delhi or Gurgaon,” he
says, “but there was no Metro
then, the autorickshaw would
not go to Gurgaon and cabs were
too pricey.”
The Tuesday nights have now
lost their exclusivity. After the high
court verdict, more restaurants,
pubs and clubs in Delhi have
started offering gay special nights.
Among these are Cibo in Hotel
Janpath, Ai in MGF Metropolitan
Mall, and Baci in Sundar Nagar.
Delhi’s premier cultural spaces,
such as India Habitat Centre near
Lodhi Garden and Attic in Regal
Building, regularly host
gay-themed film festivals and
book readings. The Delhi,
Mumbai and Bangalore editions
of Time Out magazine have a
page devoted to the listings of gay
and lesbian events.
In 2007, Husain began
attending JNU. “I’m a minority in
the campus,” he says. “I live in a
hostel and people do talk about
me. Why am I so colourfully
dressed? Why am I so sissy? But
largely people let you be. No one
tosses the swear word chhakka at
me.”
In 1993, Vikram Seth’s novel A
Suitable Boy carried a fleeting
scene of gay love. In 1999,
Penguin India published
Yaarana: Gay Writings from South
Asia. It carried pieces by
playwright Mahesh Dattani, poet
R. Raj Rao, including Seth and
Kavi. Following literature, in the
2000s, Bollywood made
homosexuality playful, albeit with
stereotypes, and a part of
mainstream films.
In 2001, the NGO Naz
Foundation filed a lawsuit in the

Delhi high court asking for the
legalization of homosexual
intercourse between consenting
adults. In 2008, New Delhi’s first
gay pride parade took place on
Tolstoy Marg. Less than a
thousand people came. The
following year, the second parade
had more than 3,000 people. Drag
queens danced to dandiya songs;
masked homosexuals flaunted
their orientation but not their
identity; and many others who
could be straight, gay or bisexual
walked with them. Curious
onlookers watched from bikes,
autorickshaws, cars and buses.
Three days later, at 10.35am on 2
July, in the jam-packed Chamber
1 of Delhi high court, a bench
comprising chief justice A.P. Shah
and justice S. Muralidhar held
that the law making gay sex a
criminal offence violated
fundamental rights. People
present in the court started
crying, jumping, and calling their
lovers, friends and families. Later
that day they gathered at the
Jantar Mantar, the popular place
for holding demonstrations, to
commemorate the “victory”.
Husain was also there. “For the
first time in my life, I felt free,”
he says.
The new liberation hasn’t
affected his love life. It’s still in the
closet. “Once I took my boyfriend
to my home in Mauritius for the
holidays and my aunt spotted me
combing his hair. My father, a
pious Muslim, was told but even
now he refuses to believe that I’m
gay. Meanwhile, my friend is not
out to his parents in Amritsar. His
mother calls me his younger
brother. It’s sweet of her but it fills
me with frustration. I’m his lover.”

The Internet has made it easier
to hook up for sex or love, but
there are still many with no access
to the Net. The cruising areas
remain crowded. The era when a
man would enter a park, have
quick anonymous sex with
another man and go back to his
family is not over. In Delhi, the
park above Palika Bazaar parking
teems every evening with gay
men, office-goers of all ages,
married and unmarried. After
11pm, certain spots in the
city—like the bus stand outside
Hyatt Hotel, the urinal at gate No.
3 of New Delhi railway station, the
Moolchand flyover—come alive
with lonely men looking for a few
minutes of sexual intimacy with a
person of the same sex.
The old prejudices aren’t dead.
In July, the Union health minister
Ghulam Nabi Azad said, “The
disease of men having sex with
men is unnatural and not good
for Indian society.” In February, a
news channel in Hyderabad did a
homophobic sting operation on
men listed in the Hyderbad room
of PlanetRomeo and publicly
“outed” them.
Next year, Husain intends
to complete his thesis in English
and cultural studies. His
boyfriend has graduated as a
doctor. “We might move to the
UK,” says Husain. “There’s
no future for our relationship
in India.”
Meanwhile, the first issue of
2011 of Bombay Dost, published
twice a year, will carry a famous
Bollywood actor on its cover with
his interview on being a gay icon
in India.
mayank.s@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SOCIETY

RASHMI
VASUDEVA

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

AS BANGALORE TRANSFORMED FROM A
BOULEVARD­DOTTED ‘GARDEN CITY’ TO A
GLITZY TORCHBEARER OF CHANGE, THE
CITY’S GREAT EXODUS TO THE US WAS A
SYMBOL OF LIBERATION

a

the ‘States’fixation

The American dream:
For Bangaloreans,
the US was the
land of liberty and
opportunities in the
1990s.

At the departure lounge of the
HAL airport in Bangalore that
night of September in 1997, my
friend from school Kavitha R.N.
looked thoroughly weighed
down. RN, as we fondly called
her, had three unwieldy bags to
take care of and a brand new
“softie” husband who was
taking her to Santa Clara, US.
To her great consternation, an
extended family of 25-odd
people had come to the airport
to bid her goodbye. One of
them had even written a poem
about how happy he was about
her going to the “States”, which
he thrust unceremoniously into
her already busy hands. Another
put a marigold garland around
her neck while a young boy
gave her a bouquet. Her aunt
made her swallow some sugar.
The buzz around her was
electric, to say the least, and the
conversation was all about
which cousin of hers was next
in line to marry and which were
the best hunting grounds to find
suitable US grooms.
To me, her discomfort was
obvious, as was her state of
mind. She was muttering about
how embarrassed and annoyed
she was but her eyes told a
different story. They had already
spotted freedom.
Nothing brought out this
sense of “journey to liberation”
into sharp relief as much as
Bangalore’s great exodus to the
“States” in the 1990s did. A
successful Kannada movie
released in 1995 and set in San
Francisco poignantly depicted
how the American dream
could corrode minds and
distance hearts. The movie’s
title, America! America!!, said it
all. But such cultural depictions
of ground realities were rare.
People hardly fathomed the
possible perils of this ambitious
voyage—the goodies they were
discovering on the way were
too blinding. As often
happens with change, what
led to it and
what came
out of it was
discovered
much later,
mostly in
hindsight.
The country
was liberated
economically,
politically and
socially in the 1990s,
but freedom blossomed
most inside minds. This
was most visible in
Bangalore, which itself
transformed without
ceremony from a
boulevard-dotted
“garden city” to the
glitzy torchbearer of this
change. It is hard to
determine whether it was
the youngsters who were
glowing in the reflected
glory of a city thrust into
global limelight that was
suddenly in the spotlight,
or it was the city that was
preening because of its
youth, who literally led
the charge into the new
millennium. It was

TL RAMASWAMY

Sleepy city: Bangalore’s glamorous MG Road, pictured in the early 2000s here, was a hub of IT­created nouveau riche.
perhaps possibly both. What
was palpable, though, was the
change in body language and
thought processes not just of
an entire post-reform
generation, but also of their
parents, aunts and uncles,
soaked and dyed for years in
pre-reform tight-fistedness
and conservatism.
Several things happened
simultaneously that culminated
in 1990s’ Bangalore making the
American dream its own. Cable
television, the Internet and the
opening up of the markets led to
a giddy consumption craze that
was both fed by and mirrored in
the decade’s movies, music,
television and advertising. Whole
classrooms of students about to
complete class XII in school felt
liberated enough to chant “yes,
we can”. Silicon Valley triumph
tales were sliding off tongues
that were unused to uttering
names such as San Jose and
Santa Clara.
People who had resigned
themselves to spending lifetimes
in rented houses and travelling
by autorickshaws became the
dreaded nouveau riche,
deliriously smug in their
spanking new Marutis and
Cielos, not to mention
declarations in “Kanglish” of
plans to buy a “flat-u”. For
young Bangaloreans, IT was the
magic word that turned stone
walls into doors; for their parents
and extended family, it was the
road map to deliverance—the
best way to notch up social
status. All they needed was an
offspring whose life story could
be narrated at weddings and
family functions as “Computers
madthaiddane” (he is “doing”
computers).
Most were happy to be
described as such and more than

willing to undertake this journey.
If the odd soul or two did
demur, they would have to have
a core of steel to ward off the
intense peer and family pressure.
Thus, somebody like me, who
detested physics and mugged up
integration sums to pass my
class XII board exams,
nonchalantly took up tutorials
for the Common Entrance Test
(CET), with grand plans of
studying engineering (electronics
or computer science…the others
were infra dig) and somebody
like my friend, Seshadri, limerick
king and impromptu Kannada
poet who dreamt of writing “one
suspense novel every year”,
ended up in Sunnyvale, US,
with an MS, two children and
a house.
The majority believed that this
three-point formula—study
engineering, get a “software” job,
and then go to the US either on
work or to study—would not just
take their family into the
software hall of fame, but also
grant them individual liberties,
both cultural and economic.
And indeed, it did. These were
the subliminal trips, the mental
journeys that were both the
result and the cause of the
actual physical voyage to the US.
The narrative though was
thoroughly unlike that of the
Swinging Sixties. If the flower
children were all about rebellion
and celebratory capriciousness,
the yuppies were about being
practical and ambitious. The
world wasn’t a marijuanainduced “mayanagar”, but a
gritty, real place where money
should be chased. As far as the
yuppies were concerned, this
climb up the social ladder was
both desirable and legitimate. So
it was that at the heart of it all,
“States” actually spelt m-o-n-e-y.

Whether they recognized it or
not, the older generation fully
supported this enterprise,
sometimes visibly, sometimes
silently. And you couldn’t blame
them. For families that hadn’t
seen any wealth for generations,
these were heady times.
The youngsters though were
clever in various other ways.
They didn’t let go of their
tradition but they were
self-assured enough to work
around it and if need be,
underneath it. The most striking
example is that of drinking
alcohol. In conservative
middle-class homes of
Bangalore (from where came the
majority of the “softies”),
drinking was not exactly in
vogue and in many cases, even
strictly prohibited. But drink
beer you did (and pronounced it
to rhyme with “heer” as b-e-e-r),
and boozing was really the
surest way to arrive. Of course,
you never got so drunk so that
you couldn’t get home at a
decent hour (after gobbling up
fistfuls of mints). The flower
child might have stood up to his
dad and demanded to know
why he was against alcohol, but
the yuppie never crowed about
it, nor did he question his
parents. It was vital that they be
on his side.
The young men and women
would give their parents the slip
and go on dates, but would not
say no to an arranged marriage
a few years later. The “boy”
would work in the Bay Area but
he would gladly take leave and
come home to take a Kannadiga
bride from his sub-caste. Of
course, there were
exceptions—and there will
always be.
This was also why for many
girls, the journey was much

shorter. All they had to do was
marry a US “softie” to arrive. For
many of my friends, it was the
ultimate liberation—you could
live away from in-laws, wear
what you wanted and booze! For
the girls’ parents, it was an
achievement to marry their
daughter to a “softie” and pack
her off to the US, complete with
the kind of farewell that my
friend got and carefully packed
saarina pudis (rasam powder)
and thokkus (tamarind pickle).
While the 1990s’ children
undertook many such journeys,
physical and otherwise, their
parents were on a trip of their
own. They were living
vicariously through their
children and often making up
for their own lack of spending
opportunities by overindulging.
What’s more, soon it would be
time to actually take that flight
to the US, pose for pictures in
front of the Golden Gate Bridge
and the Statue of Liberty,
patently uncomfortable in
“Punjabi dresses” (as
salwar-kameezes were then
called), sneakers, and baseball
caps, not to mention the
triumphant return journey
bearing Mars bars, Hershey’s
Kisses, some colourful
umbrellas, “scent” bottles and
teddy bears. The American
voyage became their identity,
and so powerful was this
identity for many from the
pre-reform generation in
Bangalore that it continues to
hold sway even in 2011.
Which is why at a wedding
recently, a distant aunt was
introduced to me as the one
“who is going to the States this
September”. Some journeys
never end.
Write to lounge@livemint.com

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INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

NUCLEAR
TESTS

JACOB P KOSHY

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AFTER 1947, INDIAN SCIENCE WAS ROOTED
IN THE ETHOS OF SOCIALISM, UNTIL
NATIONALISTIC AND MILITARY MOTIVATIONS
GUIDED THE POKHRAN EXPLOSIONS IN 1998
TEKEE TANWAR/AFP

The beginning: The
1998 nuclear test in
Pokhran village,
Rajasthan, was a
symbol of India’s
emergence as an
Asian military
power.

it wasn’t just
rocket science

p

Politicians and scientists share a
curious relationship in India.
Unlike the US, where
governments don’t flinch from
cutting funds for research,
scientists in India rarely complain
of diminished budgetary support.
However, no politician really
dreams of a “minister, science
and technology” epaulette on his
CV because there’s little he can
do in the decision machinery of
these organizations. In a record
of sorts, the UPA government,
assailed by corruption charges,
has shuffled three ministers in
the past two years.
But in May 1998, every
politician wanted to share the
same stage as scientists. On 13
May, prime minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee announced that India
had successfully tested five nuclear
devices at Pokhran, a village in
Rajasthan. In doing so, he
supervised India’s transition from
nuclear tyro to Asian military
power and international pariah.
Pokhran-II, as the media
christened the events, consisted
of three explosions on the first
day, including a thermonuclear
device, and two on the second.
Then Defence Research and
Development Organisation
(DRDO) chief A.P.J. Abdul
Kalam, the man at the ground
along with principal scientific
adviser and then Atomic Energy
Commission chairman R.
Chidambaram, signalled the
go-ahead. The tests, conducted
within milliseconds of each other,
showed up as a single explosion
on the Global Seismic Network, a
bellwether network crafted for
detecting natural earthquakes.
While the most tangible
aftershock of India’s insouciance
was the lay, “we-did-it” euphoria
of national pride, the real
jolts—so entrenched as to have
passed by almost unmentioned
in journalistic literature—were
felt indirectly by scattered Indian
scientists who had to rapidly
adjust to a period of limited
cutting-edge equipment,

know-how and funds.
After independence, Indian
science, which was rooted in the
political ethos of socialism,
focused its budding scientific
thrust on developing its nuclear
and space capabilities, even as
Watson and Crick’s new ideas of
the structure of DNA and William
Shockley, John Bardeen and
Walter Brattain’s invention of the
transistor were playing midwife
to modern biotechnology as well
as the electronics industry.
As Kalam, who went on to
become president, has
recounted several times, even as
our first rockets were being
ferried on the backs of bicycles,
there came up a group of bright,
motivated youngsters—spurred
by nationalistic pride—who
were joining these defence and
space establishments and
building up know-how to create
nuclear reactors, missiles and a
scientific reputation.
By the late 1980s, the world
was changing. The USSR was
dead and the Internet was born.
Swadeshi was passé and the
World Trade Organization (WTO)
and globalization were the
buzzwords. Countries such as
Japan, Taiwan and South Korea
were becoming hothouses of
electronic manufacturing.
Competitive science was no
longer possible without
international collaboration and
partnerships. The rapid
obsolescence that began to
characterize products of
semiconductor technology such
as faster and cheaper computers
was due in no small measure to
the philosophy of outsourcing.
Nuclear technology continued
to be largely developed in Cold
War silos even as space science
began to break out of these
constraints. Just when Indian
space scientists were beginning
to perfect the science of
launching small- and
medium-sized satellites, to the
extent that they could confidently
begin pitching India’s capabilities

as a cheap, reliable purveyor of
satellites on commercial markets,
Pokhran-II happened.
India’s defiance of the existing
superpowers, who were trying to
direct and regulate the pace of its
nuclear missile development
capabilities by getting the
subcontinent to sign the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,
meant that the UN Security
Council condemned India’s
action and gave a kind of moral
sanction to the US to impose a
variety of sanctions against India.
A telling editorial, that
appeared in the 10 May 1999
issue of Current Science, a widely
read science journal published by
the Indian Academy of Sciences,
said: “….the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research (TIFR) in
Mumbai is almost exclusively
devoted to ‘blue sky’ research,
but is funded directly by the
Department of Atomic Energy
(DAE)…This relationship has
been a very fruitful one, with the
TIFR budgets being insulated
from the many uncertainties
faced by institutions outside the
DAE umbrella. Unfortunately,
connection with the DAE now
means that even scientists doing
basic biology, chemistry or
physics (mathematicians are
apparently immune to the effects
of sanctions) face great
difficulties in getting chemicals
and equipment from several
overseas sources.”
Because of that a slew of
high-end technology products,
such as blitzing highperformance computing
machines, or “supercomputers”,
critical components for the Light
Combat Aircraft—India’s flagship
attempt at making its own aircraft
engines—and other such
paraphernalia, which were all
part of a list called “dual use
technologies”, were hard to
procure. This led to the
deceleration of top-end science.
The reason this didn’t evoke
sufficient consternation here was
because in monetary terms, the

bottom line economic loss to
India was piddling—a few
hundred million dollars—as most
of the critical aspects of trade
with the US, such as agriculture
assistance, military equipment,
etc., were left untouched.
Scientists involved in civilian
research programmes recount
several stories of how simple
tasks, such as importing
computers of particular
specifications or procuring
certain chemicals and rare
components, became
bureaucratic nightmares. Several
times, devices would have to be
separated into components,
shipped to neighbouring
countries—where such barriers
didn’t exist—imported and
then reassembled.
This didn’t put India into
technology quarantine. In fact,
it’s often argued that had it not
been for this isolation, India
woudn’t have institutions such as
the Centre for Development of
Advanced Computing, which
made our first supercomputers.
This period, however, also
marked the ascension of China as
a major scientific powerhouse.
Till the early 1990s, scientific
publications by Indian scientists
outnumbered Chinese output;
the tables turned and remain that
way. While India became the hot
spot for the business process
outsourcing (BPO) industry, it
continued to lose on
opportunities for basic science
researchers. Most of the brightest,
went to the IITs, did
management from the IIMs and
joined consulting outfits and
multinational banks, instead of
pursuing Phds, becoming
inventors, heading technology
start-ups and strengthening
India’s manufacturing prowess.
The sanctions weren’t the only
reason for this state of affairs, but
remain one of those big
“what-ifs”. What if there hadn’t
been sanctions? Would we have
more nuclear-powered electricity
today? Wouldn’t we have less

carbon emissions and thus
greater leverage at international
climate change negotiations?
Wouldn’t the Indian Space
Research Organisation (Isro) be
launching far heavier satellites
and be slightly better prepared
for its proposed manned space
flight mission? The government
has now woken up to the
paucity of quality institutions to
train undergraduates for science,
but wouldn’t institutes—the
Indian Institutes of Science
Education and Research,
undergraduate courses at the
Indian Institute of Science, the
Indian Institute of Space
Science and Technology—have
bloomed earlier?
It is no coincidence that since
former US president George
Bush’s visit to India in 2006 and
the subsequent signing of the
nuclear deal between the two
countries, there has been an
increase in international
conference travel, greater
funding and more research
collaboration between the two
countries, as well as more
venture funding opportunities
for Indian entrepreneurs.
Political and military
motivations guided the Pokhran
explosions in 1998. Reports
were doing the rounds that
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons
programme was in an advanced
stage and the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), fresh from an
election victory, had to act on
election promises of “reviewing
India’s nuclear security”.
Earlier this year, India seriously
began a push to develop solar
energy technologies, and add 20
GW by 2020. Given that there is
now another global scramble to
harness the energy of the sun in
an affordable, scalable manner,
international cooperation is the
order of the day. Winning that
race may prompt politicians to
once again joust for the reflected
glory of India’s scientists.
jacob.k@livemint.com

L18

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

LITERATURE THERE WAS GLAMOUR IN THE WORLD OF
SUPRIYA NAIR

INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH. WRITERS
PRODUCED A GLOBAL LITERATURE AND
AT HOME, THEY BECAME CULTURAL
EXPLAINERS AND CELEBRITIES

the internationalists

i

I remember a story from 1994
that I now suspect may have
been apocryphal. On winning the
WH Smith Literary Award for his
tour de force published the
previous year, A Suitable Boy,
Vikram Seth was heard
remarking that he was very
pleased, especially since he had
never heard of the Smith Literary
Award before. I read this, not in
The Times of India or the handful
of other news publications to
which my household subscribed,
but in a small, Delhi-based
children’s publication called
Newsjoy, to which I frequently
contributed poems and brief
political commentary. I was 10
years old.
I recount this to demonstrate
how ubiquitous, in 1994, the
celebrity of Seth was. A year
previously, he had been a poet,
the author of a Tibetan
travelogue and a
Pushkin-inspired novel in
verse—not exactly the stuff of
which Indian idols are made.
Now, he was drawing
comparisons with Jane Austen
and Leo Tolstoy for his
1,500-page family drama.
Almost more interestingly, he
appeared to be making a lot of
money from writing.
It seems inaccurate to say that
the literary 1990s in India were
marked by a consuming interest
in wealth, because money is
always interesting to everybody.
But we can say with certainty that
riches and fame converged on
literature to a degree previously
undreamt of. In an essay
published earlier this year, writer
and editor Urvashi Butalia pointed
out that the 1990s were witness to
our first real explosion in trade
publishing, in a market that until
then had been dominated by
educational material.
Unlike the 2000s, in which
Indian-language publishing has
come to dominate two-thirds of
the market, in the 1990s English
publishing made up almost half
the Indian market. And foreign
publishers, allowed in for the first
time thanks to economic reforms,
paid unprecedented attention to
Indian writers in English.
Seth received an advance of
£250,000 (around `1.8 crore
now) for A Suitable Boy; this, like
the overwhelming size of the
book (1,350 pages in Penguin
India’s paperback edition),
became its mark of recognition
for many, and generated vast
excitement in the national media,
whose own state of growth may
remind us of what Martin Amis
acidly remarked of Britain in the

1980s, when the newspapers,
“running out of adulterous
golfers and alcoholic movie stars
and rapist boxers to write about,
discovered that they were
reduced to writing about writers.”
It may have escaped broader
notice that more people than ever
were also talking about Seth’s
work. Seth would go on to
produce only one more novel
during the 1990s (An Equal
Music; 400 pages, advance:
£500,000), but it was the decade
when he, and Indian English
fiction, earned a reputation—a
critical reputation—by whose
measure they continue to be
judged, at home and in the world.
None of the writers Seth joined
in the higher altitudes of Indian
English writing had sprung fully
formed into the decade. Amitav
Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry
(1991 Booker Prize-winner for
Such A Long Journey) had both
produced acclaimed books in the
1980s, and Salman Rushdie and
Anita Desai’s literary gifts, it
could be argued, had achieved
their fullness by 1990.
In the following years, these
writers became representatives of
a perhaps monolithic “Indian”
literature in English abroad, as
well as participants in a global
literature—also in English. At
home, they became cultural
explainers, keepers of public
memory, inspirational
figures—and celebrities.
In spite of the vacuousness of
some of the attention they
received (one of the highlights of
1999’s literary coverage, even in

Newsjoy, was the “Rushdie versus
Seth” showdown, manufactured
because they both published
novels about music that year), it
was remarkable how broad their
collective scope was.
Perhaps the only experience
all these writers had in common,
was that they had all lived and
worked outside India; each, in
his and her uniquely elegant
way, was an internationalist, as
comfortable in India as he or she
was in Egypt or London or North
America. This quality also
created a conversation, and I’m
afraid an echo chamber, about
diaspora and globalization in
Indian writing; one of the era’s
anxieties was the feeling that
great writing, talked-about
writing in Indian English, was
only happening elsewhere.
But “Why not have two mother
tongues, or if possible, 11 mother
tongues?” the bilingual,
mercurial Kiran Nagarkar asked
in an interview. Nagarkar had
written an attention-grabbing
first novel as far back as
1973—the Marathi Saat Sakkam
Trechalis (Seven Sixes are
Forty-Three). 1994’s electrifying
Ravan & Eddie, his first—and at
the time, severely
underrated—English novel,
remains as great a depiction of
Mumbai life as ever committed
to the page in English.
Nagarkar’s reputation was
really to flower at the start of the
following decade, when his
acclaimed novel Cuckold created
such a sensation that it made
news even of its Sahitya Akademi

award—not typically the most
publicized of literature’s baubles.
Unlike the others, he was no
internationalist. The register of
his voice, even in his
unexceptionable, non-chutneyfied
English, was resonantly, and
solely, Indian. The dilemmas that
writers like him addressed, of
writing in both an oppressive
language and a unifying one,
remained central. My professors
and I would still be worrying over
these questions in English class,
years into the next decade.
So if not Nagarkar and his
peers, who were the new figures
added to the highbrow oligopoly
of the 1990s? This, the decade of
India’s international beauty
pageant glory and superhit films
about bhangra-dancing
non-resident Indians, also
brought us a memorable handful
of prize winners, future prize
winners, prize nominees and
prizes which, like Seth, we had
never heard of.
No one personified, and
publicly detested the
consequences of this marriage of
art and glamour more than
Arundhati Roy. In the years
following a brilliant literary debut
(The God of Small Things, 1997)
and the plaudits it received, Roy,
now a political essayist with an
extreme disinclination for the
frivolities of the novel-reading
classes, stated on record—several
times—that she was only too
happy to quash the Indian
bourgeoisie’s dreams of her as a
poster girl for their kind, a “pretty
girl who wrote a book”.
VIRENDRA SINGH/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Path­breaking: Arund­
hati Roy won the
Booker Prize in 1997.

Published at an opportune
moment in the country’s public
life, the novel and her Booker
Prize also established an
inconvenient relationship
between Roy and the people who
would go on to become her
readers. I can personally vouch
for the country’s coterminous
awakening to anarchocapitalism; my much-read copy
of The God of Small Things,
bought in 1998, is still the pirated
paperback a hawker smuggled to
me at a traffic signal. We might
argue that Roy, like Pankaj
Mishra, who published his first
book (the travelogue Butter
Chicken in Ludhiana) in 1992,
still writes against that decade,
when new problems began to
require a new social criticism.
Other debutants became
major voices which would grow,
change and produce important
fiction well into the new century:
Amit Chaudhuri wrote A Strange
and Sublime Address in 1991;
Anita Desai’s daughter, Kiran,
would publish Hullabaloo in the
Guava Orchard in 1998; and
1994’s Red Earth and Pouring
Rain still competes with Vikram
Chandra’s own later work for the
status of his best novel.
These writers, two decades
later, still console the ambitious
parents of Indians determined to
take literature degrees. Their
children may lack worldliness,
but like Roy, who now refuses to
write for their class, they might
give them the pleasure of both a
book and a Booker.
As with software engineers, it
grows less and less important for
writers to migrate in order to find
work. But here, I may be getting
ahead of the story. The
efflorescence of the 2000s now
lends the 1990s the retrospective
glamour of the film industry in
the era of big studios: We can
worship their product without
finding it desirable to go back to
their methods of production. The
template of fame has altered and
expanded to accommodate,
among other things, more
women writers, more
translations, more
non-traditional media, and more
publishing houses. (The riches, it
is reported, have also made their
way to one or two).
Calendars are so unrelentingly
full these days that it seems
simultaneously impossible, and
totally probable, that a writer, on
accepting a lucrative award,
confesses that she has never
heard of it before.
supriya.n@livemint.com

L19

LOUNGE
INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

CINEMA

SANJUKTA
SHARMA

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THE HIGHEST­EVER HINDI FILM GROSSER WAS
MADE IN 1994, SRK EMERGED AS THE NEW
‘HINDUSTANI’ HERO, AND THE BEST INDIAN
FILMS WERE WATCHED IN THE WEST

o

mumbai ka king kaun?

Made for each other: Raj
and Simran, the
Bollywood poster couple of
the 1990s, represented a
generation at ease with
modernity and tradition.

On a Monday morning,
Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir, a
42-year-old movie theatre,
understandably looks forsaken.
The ticket counter looks closed
from the outside, but is
accessible from inside. A
balcony ticket for the morning
show of Dilwale Dulhania Le
Jayenge (DDLJ) is `20. The dull,
grainy print on the enormous
screen just about lights up the
spacious theatre, with a capacity
of about 1,000. At least 100
people jeer every time a song
begins. Otherwise, there’s
pin-drop silence.
Why do a young Shah Rukh
Khan in baggy pants, a
Harley-Davidson jacket, and
facial contortions of simian
proportions, and a young Kajol,
at ease with a short red dress
as well as a white
salwar-kameez and bandhni
dupatta, in the Eurorail still
arouse loud applause? In 2010,
the show completed 800
weeks—and is still on. Now, it
is a piece of history.
DDLJ, produced by Yash Raj
Films, Bombay’s romance
foundry since the 1980s, and
directed by its then 23-year-old
scion Aditya Chopra, released in
Indian theatres and in about 20
theatres in diaspora pockets of
the UK and US in 1995. It was
the pinnacle of Khan’s already
ascending status as a
not-so-angry and charmingly
gawky boy-hero—the hero who
spends his father’s money,
drinks Stroh’s beer, woos a
quasi-liberated Punjabi
girl in Zurich and pursues her to
a village blooming with
mustard fields.
SRK became the face of a
new, globalized India which
prized money. But he also
offered us the solace that all is
not lost. Just like Raj Kapoor,
Raj Malhotra’s dil was
Hindustani. That the Everyman
at Maratha Mandir that Monday
morning still gets him says
something about what movies
of the 1990s did to us. They
comforted us; DDLJ still
comforts us. Anupama Chopra
writes in her engaging
biography of the superstar, King
of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan,

which examines him as an icon
of globalized India, “Shah Rukh
Khan personified the new
millennium Indian who
combines a global perspective
with local values and is at home
in the world.”
Every 1990s’ baby understands
this tension. MTV was cool,
aspirational; arranged marriage
and having babies were too.
Spending money on foreign
brands was liberating; so was
buying one’s own home.
Migrating from a small town for
higher studies or a well-paying
job was easy; being 30 and single
or gay was not. Cinema reflected
this middle ground through
sanitized stories about urban
India. The common man and the
village disappeared. Producers
wanted to conquer the diaspora
market—which, in the next
decade, would culminate in the
puerile idea that Bollywood is
India’s “cultural ambassador”.
The arts did not muster any
robust reaction to the new
economic order. The idea of
open dialogue inherent in the
idea of a globalized society did
not affect mainstream Hindi
cinema; instead there was
homage to symbols of
globalization such as expensive
cars, foreign brands and
extravagant weddings. A sense
of easy euphoria related to
spending money infected milieus
in film stories.
In contrast, a large slice of
Japan’s transitional generation of
the mid-1990s, left out of the
country’s economic boom, chose
cultural anarchy. It used money
to rebel against cultural norms
and produced manga, the
Harajuku girls, the motorcycle
gangs (speed tribes),
underground films and punk
musicians. A cultural
underground is only beginning to
brew in Indian films, with works
such as Gandu by Bengali
film-maker Kaushik Mukherjee.
The only interesting, if not
revolutionary, experiments in
cinema were facilitated by the
opening up of the distribution
system, leading to the “multiplex
film” or the “crossover” film in
the next decade—defined, not by
aesthetic or idea, but by the

audience they were tailor-made
for. The first revolution in
distribution was because of one
film. Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum
Aapke Hain Koun..! (HAHK) was
released in a few select theatres
in 1994, including Regal, Eros
and Liberty in Mumbai, with the
producer Rajshri Productions’
promise that if smaller theatres
were spruced up, they would
distribute it there too. HAHK,
about two families mired in
endless ritualistic revelry and
song-and-dance routines, had a
spectacular opening at the box
office and many theatres
instantly renovated and
improved infrastructure. Ticket
prices increased and family
audiences went back to theatres.
Madhuri Dixit, then in the prime
of her stardom, hosted a long,
grandiose Marwari wedding on
screen, and India’s business class
and aspiring middle class flocked
to theatres. HAHK remains the
highest-grossing Hindi film of
all time and its gross profit
(adjusted to inflation) is `309.26
crore, followed by DDLJ
(`267.77 crore).
Barjatya facilitated the
beginning of a distribution
revolution in the mid-1990s
which was to culminate in the
opening of India’s first multiplex
theatre, Delhi’s PVR Anupam, in
1997. A year before DDLJ
released, metro audiences
warmed up to Dev Benegal’s
English August, the first English
film set in an Indian milieu, to
release in Indian theatres—a
precursor to the “multiplex film”,
and a far cry from the late 1980s,
when going to the theatres to
watch a film was unfashionable.
Like everything else in the
1980s, film production and
distribution were in a slump. The
National Film Development
Corporation of India (NFDC) was
almost bankrupt, a mere content
provider for Doordarshan. The
arthouse or parallel cinema
movement was history in the
country’s film capital and
Amitabh Bachchan’s career was
at a low ebb. Ajay Bijli, chairman
and managing director of PVR
Cinemas, said in an interview to
Lounge in 2010, “Scale matters,
but I would rather be the best

than the biggest.” This was a
mantra that gained momentum
in the movie business through
the decade.
By the 1990s, in the US and
Europe, the home video
market had exploded, films
had been scaled down to suit
small screens, close-ups
became de-rigueur and the
New York independent film
industry was a formidable
establishment. Here, with PVR
Anupam and subsequently
many other multiplexes, the
experience of watching a film
changed. While going to a
multiplex was luxury, the
number of smaller films suited
to niche city audiences grew.
Through most of the decade,
heroes and heroines were soaked
in consumerist gloss—with Yash
Raj Films ruling the roost with
films such as Dil To Pagal Hai
and Dharma Productions’ Kuch
Kuch Hota Hai. Commercially
successful Hindi cinema either
projected the pretty urban
confines of society or looked
back on 1980s staples such as
patriotism (1942: A Love Story,
1993; Border, 1997) and
forbidden love (Dil, 1990; Beta,
1992; Raja Hindustani, 1996).
The socialist hangover of the
1970s and 1980s found crass
expression in films such as Raja
Hindustani.
The films which combined
intellectual rigour and
commitment to cinematic craft
were being made in the south,
especially Kerala, and
appreciated in festivals outside
India. The films of Shaji Karun
and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, both
graduates from Pune’s Film and
Television Institute of India
(FTII), in this decade contained
the opposite of society’s
euphoria—which great art of any
age often does. Karun’s most
memorable film, Vanaprastham
(1999), is about a Kathakali
dancer, played by Mohanlal, who
is shunned by his family and
lover. He is the master of his art,
and in the film’s dazzling climax
he uses it to rage against his own
sorrow. Gopalakrishnan’s
Vidheyan (1993, about a
Christian migrant worker’s
conflict with his master, played

by Mammootty), Kathapurushan
(1995, about a man’s struggles
after embracing Marxist ideas),
and Mathilukal (1990, a love
story of two prisoners who can’t
see each other) are important
films of the decade. So are some
works of Kannada director Girish
Kasaravalli (Mane, 1990;
Kraurya, 1996), who explored
women’s heroic struggles in
conservative rural societies in the
1990s. Other than National Film
Awards ceremonies, these films
were not part of our cultural
map. The Tamil director Mani
Ratnam, a master of the grand
canvas and the visually potent
moment, first bridged the
regional-national gap with Roja,
a political drama, which was
dubbed and released in Hindi in
1992. Ratnam’s Bombay (1995)
reached a wider India.
In Mumbai, Satya, in 1999,
was the new road. It was the
birth of what critics have called
Mumbai Noir. The setting,
Mumbai’s underworld, was not
new. What the writers of the film
(Anurag Kashyap and Saurabh
Shukla) and the director
shattered were sentimental
“Bollywood” ideas of poetic
justice and virtue. It was,
aesthetically and on paper, a lean
film but it was also commercially
viable. Bhiku Mhatre, one of its
leading men, and indeed the
film’s most powerful voice,
played by Manoj Bajpai,
redefined the petty gangster.
Drunk with power, but ultimately
powerless, Mhatre was a figure
possible only in the 1990s’
dystopic Mumbai, ravaged by
underworld terror, and
weakened by an indifferent
political establishment. Ram
Gopal Varma’s language was
backed by extremely competent
sound design and editing.
In the 2000s, the water was
no longer still. You could get
away with a Munnabhai as well
as a bratty Devdas from
Chandigarh as long as they
were new on the eyes and ears,
and had a grain of truth.
Box-office figures courtesy
Boxofficeindia.com.
sanjukta.s@livemint.com

L20

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

TELEVISION

NALIN MEHTA

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

IT WAS A DECADE THAT ESTABLISHED TV
AT THE EPICENTRE OF INDIAN
CAPITALISM. BUT IT WAS ALSO THE
DEATH OF THOUGHTFUL, CRITICAL
PROGRAMMING

the daily theatre
in our lives

f
Shining star: Satel­
lite television in the
1990s became the
show window of
economic reforms.

For television, the 1990s began
with a worried bureaucrat in the
ministry of information and
broadcasting submitting a file to
his minister on how to stop
what was then still called the
“satellite invasion”. Science
fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s
1945 vision of a satellite in
geosynchronous orbit solving
the global broadcast distribution
problem suddenly seemed
realizable with Hong Kong
businessman Li Ka-Shing’s
decision to invest in AsiaSat-1. It
was the first commercially
available satellite that could
simultaneously broadcast to
television audiences from
Turkey to Japan and his newly
launched Star TV intended to
target the wealthiest 5% of Asian
elites in the 38 countries where
its signal reached.
V.P. Singh was still in power
and his information minister P.
Upendra presciently commented
on the file, “You cannot stop the
sun by holding an umbrella. The
more you try, the more you
encourage people to watch.”
Television was still a jealously
guarded Doordarshan
monopoly, accruing from the
colonial 1885 Indian Telegraph
Act, and these two trends—that
of a protectionist state deploying
a worthless umbrella, and that
of satellite television as a
resplendent idea whose time
had come—encapsulated the
story of the decade.
The outdated umbrella
attitude was best articulated by
then prime minister P.V.
Narasimha Rao who, two years
after the fall of the Babri Masjid,

abruptly cancelled the launch of
DD3, designed as an upmarket
current affairs channel with
independently produced news
bulletins to counter the BBCs
and CNNs of the world. It is
difficult to imagine now in the
cacophony of the more than 80
news channels that animate
India today but his reasoning
was revealing: “We cannot have
live broadcasts. It is too
dangerous.” Used to seeing
Doordarshan as a continuous
rolling advertisement for the
ruling party, Rao found it
difficult to envisage live news
where anyone could say
anything against the government
without fear of censorship.
Satellite TV didn’t come to
India in a vacuum. Through the
1980s, Doordarshan had built up
a mass audience. TV-watching
families in India increased from
just 2 million at the time of the
1982 Asiad to 34 million by the
time of the Gulf War in 1991.
Programmes like Hum Log had
not only established the
potential of the soap opera, they
had also shown the magic of
television as a vital cog in the
Indian consumer economy—as
a “selling medium”, to quote
CBS founder William Paley.
Apart from family planning
messaging couched as
entertainment, Hum Log also
simultaneously launched the
career of Maggi noodles in
India, its prime sponsor, and
ensured that advertisers flocked
to sponsor programmes like
Buniyaad, Nukkad and
Khandaan. Ramayan and
Mahabharat changed the

meaning of Sunday mornings
and by the time Star arrived,
India was a TV market ripe for
the picking.
Upendra’s successor as
information minister, Ajit
Panja, rhetorically raised the
spectre of a new cultural
colonialism, publicly musing if
India would “succumb exactly
as we did 250 years ago to
gunpowder”; the man who
followed him, K.P. Singh Deo,
railed against a “diabolical
invasion from the sky”; but the
genie was out of the bottle.
Within six months of its launch,
Star announced that India had
turned into its largest market.
In political and economic
terms, satellite TV, an illegal
medium till the mid-1990s,
virtually became the show
window of the economic
reforms. Foreign investors in the
early 1990s were still not sure
about the government’s
intentions, initial foreign
investments till mid-1992 were
very low and any serious
attempt to clamp down on the
channels would have been too
risky. As a cultural product then,
satellite TV worked as an ideal
marketing tool for India’s
liberalization. Typical of the
jugaad nature of Indian reform,
sections of the state, like the
ministry of information and
broadcasting, fought it tooth and
nail, while others, like VSNL,
embraced it wholeheartedly.
The 70,000 or so cable
operators—“splendid pirates”, as
Rupert Murdoch called
them—that sprang up across the
country symbolized the
AFP

entrepreneurial energies at the
bottom end of the new TV
ecosystem that emerged, just as
people like Subhash Chandra,
formerly a rice trader, typified its
top end. At a time when
traditional media houses were
too hidebound to see the new
opportunity, Chandra took his
Zee TV to the stock market. It
became the first major Indian
media firm to be listed on the
Bombay Stock Exchange in 1993.
Before the Supreme Court
finally ended the state’s legal
monopoly over the airwaves in
1995, Zee and numerous
channels that came up in the
regional languages had to
contend in the early 1990s with
the legal restrictions against
private broadcasting in India. A
typical example is the
Malayalam Asianet which used
to broadcast into India from the
US military base at Subic Bay in
the Philippines by flying a
courier daily from Kerala to
Manila with recorded
programme tapes for the next
day. From Manila, the courier
took a helicopter ride every day
to the Subic Bay TV centre, for
onward transmission of the
tapes back into India.
The 1990s also shaped the
major facets that define Indian
TV today—localization,
Bollywood, cricket and news.
Each of these had major social
consequences. Star had been the
catalyst but once the initial
novelty wore off, its English-only
diet of Oprah and The Bold and
the Beautiful could only take it
that far. The music channels,
MTV and V, quickly indigenized
with Hinglish and
predominantly Hindi music
videos, but Star’s next big
industry-defining move of Kaun
Banega Crorepati and the
“saas-bahu” serials wouldn’t
come till the early 2000s. For
most of the 1990s, Zee
controlled the market. Language
wasn’t the only reason. Zee
officials spoke openly about how
they consciously strove to keep
misery off their channel, in
contrast to the developmental
images that predominated on
Doordarshan. A new generation
of soap operas like Tara drove
its early success but it also
packaged itself as an unabashed
mass entertainment channel,
relying heavily on the popular
culture of Bollywood.
One of Murdoch’s innovations
in global TV has been the use of
sport as a battering ram to
capture markets. News Corp.’s
decision to choose cricket as the
lynchpin of its strategy in India
was to change the face of the
global game itself when ESPN
announced its entry in 1993 with
$30 million (around `132 crore
now) for cricket rights. The
discovery of cricket as one of the
prime markers of Indian-ness
subsequently combined with the
burgeoning muscle of Indian
capital to turn India into the
spiritual and financial

superpower of the game. So
intertwined has cricket been
with the TV story that even the
historic 1995 Supreme Court
decision that finally freed the
airwaves from government
control was the result of a
dispute over cricket rights
between the Board of Control
for Cricket in India (BCCI) and
Doordarshan for a tour by the
West Indies.
In 1988, when Prannoy Roy
started The World this Week on
Doordarshan, he was not
allowed to even touch domestic
political news. In the old
command economy of the
times, this was seen as too
sensitive. Yet, exactly a decade
later, satellite technology
allowed him to start the first
24-hour news channel. Star
News (then run by NDTV) was
initially turned into a 24-hour
channel for only three months
in 1998 to cover the general
election but its success meant
that it continued. The real
expansion in TV news was to
come in the 2000s but the
innovations of the 1990s
showed what was possible. In
1990, TV had accounted for only
16% of the total ad spend in
India. By 2000, its share was up
to 37% even as the advertising
pie itself increased more
than sevenfold. Capitalized
billings in the advertising
industry grew from `9.3 billion
in 1990-91 to `68.3 billion by
1999-2000. It was a decade that
established TV at the epicentre
of Indian capitalism.
It was also a decade that set
the trend for the limitations of
the ratings economy that bind
Indian TV. Among the great
might-have-beens of TV in the
1990s was the death of
thoughtful, critical
programming like, for instance,
Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s Ek
Aur Mahabharat. Its alternative
retelling of the epic as
essentially an earthy tribal tale
was pulled off the air because
it didn’t prove too hot on the
TRP meters. Despite its
limitations, Doordarshan had
still managed to produce some
epic programming.
There is much that is wrong
with Indian satellite TV today
yet there is no doubt that it has
brought a new and
revolutionary theatre to the daily
life of India. People discovered
new ways to think about
themselves and to participate in
the life of the nation that would
have been unthinkable a
generation ago. The revolution
has made possible new ways of
imagining identities and
engaging with the state and
none of this would have been
possible without the 1990s.
Nalin Mehta is the founding joint
editor of the journal South Asian
History and Culture and author
of India on Television.
Write to lounge@livemint.com

L21

LOUNGE
INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

FIRST PERSON
SANJAY RAY
CHAUDHURI

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

WHEN CAMERA ATTENDANTS BECAME
CAMERAMEN, MACHINE OPERATORS
BECAME EDITORS— AN INSIDER’S VIEW OF
WHAT MADE TV18 ONE OF THE DECADE’S
BIGGEST SUCCESS STORIES

talking ’bout
my generation

f

Flashback. A white lace doily is
gently taken off a large Weston
TV set that looks like a wooden
cabinet. Colour bars in black and
white. The sad DD signature tune
(so well evoked by Zindagi Na
Milegi Dobara). Krishi Darshan.
The news read by that impassive
woman with a flower in her hair
whom I had a crush on. Secrets of
the Sea by Jacques Cousteau.
Chitrahaar. The Sunday movie.
Hum Log, Buniyaad, Ramayan.
The eerily deserted backlanes of
Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar on a Sunday
morning when Mahabharat was
on—from every window, the
same soundtrack. It was the
single highest watched TV show
on the planet at that time.
It was 1989. I had just
graduated from film school. My
first job was a freelance
assignment for a gentleman who
called himself the “Father of
Indian Television”. He operated
from a garage in Greater Kailash.
I was to write and direct a
documentary for Doordarshan on
the Cleaning of the Ganga project
in Varanasi. It took me two
months of hard labour, for which
I was paid `5,000. It was a great
business model—for him.
Since nobody cared for quality
and I needed the cash, I was
churning out two, even three
documentaries in a month. Who
commissioned them, why, and
when, if ever, they aired,
remains a mystery.
My other option was to work
in a “video magazine”. In a
censored, controlled
environment, where the “news”
on DD was little more than a
government press release,
Newstrack (from the India Today
Group) broke new ground. Every
month, they would do
hard-hitting stories and circulate
them on video cassettes which
you could subscribe to, or borrow
from the lending library. Here are
the stories Newstrack covered in
its April 1989 issue (90 minutes):
Afghanistan: On the spot report
from Kabul on Soviet pullout
aftermath; Ram Jethmalani: Ace
criminal lawyer cross-examined;
Haji Mastan: reveals the
mechanics of the underworld;
Child Labour: Children burdened
with premature adulthood;
Zoonie: Muzaffar Ali’s multi-crore
film starring Dimple.
The more things change, the
more they remain the same.
In late 1990, I met Raghav
Bahl, who was then co-anchoring
Newstrack with Madhu Trehan.
He had started Delhi’s first studio
using Betacam—the latest video
technology at that time. I could
work on the new equipment if I
got in the business.
I would go door to door to
small shops and businesses all
over Delhi and make my pitch.
The deal was, for a mere fraction
of what it would cost them to
make an ad for national TV, we
would not only write, produce,
direct and edit the ad, but also
put it on Newstrack. We called it

“Classified Video”. Miraculously,
we made enough to survive.
Next, we started BITV with a
mandate to make a
Business-News Video Magazine.
We made a terrific pilot episode
and just as we were about to
launch, Rajiv Gandhi was
tragically assassinated in May
1991 and the project was
shelved. There followed a
frustrating time when we were
drawing salaries and doing no
work. We were young, hungry,
ambitious, impatient and at the
prime of our working lives. The
Gulf War had already shown us
the future. The satellite
revolution was at our doorstep.
In sheer desperation we put
our life savings into two pilot
episodes—India Business Report
(a weekly business show), which
we sent to the BBC, and The
India Show (an entertainment
and lifestyle features show),
which we sent to Star Plus. Then
we sat back, crossed our fingers
and prayed very hard.
God was kind. Both were
selected from among hundreds of
contenders—many of them print
media giants. Two little fellows
from Delhi were suddenly
making India’s first indigenously
produced content for satellite
television. We were in the game.
The new company was named
TV18. It was 1993.
The timing couldn’t have
been better. The wave of
liberalization set off by then
prime minister P.V. Narasimha
Rao and the good Doctor
transformed our lives—as it did
many others of our generation.
The television scene had opened
up like a long dammed river.
There was an explosion of
channels, shows and formats.
Star Plus, BBC, MTV.
Baywatch, Beverly Hills, 90210,
Wonder Years on Star Plus. Game
shows, talk shows, world-class
news from CNN and BBC. It
was manna falling from the
heavens—literally.
Sales of TV sets boomed. Cable
lines criss-crossed the country,
looping across trees and over
walls, snaking their way into
every living room from
Ghatkopar to Guwahati. A newly
awakened India was awash with
new images, new aspirations.
Zee TV, launched by Subhash
Chandra in 1992, provided Hindi
content. With production values
far cheaper than the American
and British shows, Zee
nevertheless gained the
enormous advantage of
language—and broke even in the
first year of operations. Of the
early Zee shows, I remember
Saap Seedi, India’s first “reality
game show”. Soaps like Banegi
Apni Baat and Tara became
household names. Daily soaps
like Shanti were just starting.
In 1994, MTV parted ways with
Star TV and Channel V was born.
Quirky, outrageous, and speaking
an entirely new language, it
quickly defined the youth culture

of the age in a way that the
“imported” MTV never could.
Quick Gun Murugun and Mind It!
became a cult. Pepsi’s Yeh dil
maange more campaign was a
huge catalyst. Bollywood
followed. And soon enough,
emerging India’s language of
choice became Hinglish. It was
an enduring change—and we
owe it entirely to television.
Meanwhile, as premium
programme producers for a
content-hungry industry, we were
on a roll. We shifted offices every
year. At one point we had a
sign in our lobby that said
“Trespassers will be Recruited!”
We went from two people to
200 in less than three years. We
had shows on every channel in
every conceivable genre. We
discovered Cyrus Broacha and
launched him on a show called
MTV-U. We did India’s first
glamorous talk show Nikki
Tonight. We did India’s first
music countdown show, Public
Demand. We did Bhanwar—a
highly acclaimed docu-drama
series. We did good shows and
bad shows. We were on a
treadmill. We had to run just to
stay where we were.
Camera attendants became
cameramen in less than a year.
Anybody who could handle a
machine became an editor.
Scripts were written and
rewritten in one hour. There was
always a queue for edit machines

and shooting units and there
were many sleepless nights as an
army of youngsters competed
against each other to meet
impossible deadlines and
internal quality controls.
While all this sounded good,
the reality was a little different.
Channels held up payments for
six months and more. As a
capital- and cash-hungry
business we were feeling the
pinch. Intense competition was
driving down prices. Good
people were hard to find, and
harder to keep. We were
producing shows that earned us
a small margin—and we did not
own the rights to any of our
shows. We had to change the
business model.
The transformation from
a content producer to a
broadcaster is as painful and
rewarding as the metamorphosis
from a caterpillar to a butterfly.
We were tiny cogs only dimly
aware of the massive global
mergers and acquisitions that
affected our fate. Our long and
fruitful relationship with the BBC
got us a contract for a daily show
with Asia Business News (ABN)
with whom we founded a joint
venture but which was soon

taken over by CNBC. Once again,
our lives hung on a fine thread.
Once again, the gods were kind
and we got the contract.
CNBC-TV18 was launched
from a makeshift studio in a
hired auditorium where
“runners” on beaten-up Bajaj
scooters would ferry tapes every
half-hour to the nearby VSNL
headquarters for uplink—to give
the appearance of it being “live”.
In 2000 we did a hugely
successful IPO that gave us wings.
It was a fitting finale to a
momentous decade.
So what was the enduring
contribution of TV in the 1990s?
It gave India new dreams and
aspirations. It gave us a new
language. And it created a whole
new industry.
Between then and now TV has
become overhyped, clichéd,
regressive, aggressive,
protectionist, progressive,
investigative, escapist. It corrupts,
corrodes and deifies. It enables,
enlightens and entertains. It
reflects who we are and what we
are becoming.
Sanjay Ray Chaudhuri (or RayC
as he is popularly known) is
co-founder and executive director
of Network18. He is currently
working on his first feature film.
Write to lounge@livemint.com

Trendsetters: The quirky
character from Channel
V, Quick Gun Murugun,
made his way into a
movie in 2009.

L22

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

MUSIC WITH REMO FERNANDES, PENTAGRAM,

UDAY BENEGAL

ROCK MACHINE AND OTHERS, INDIE MUSIC
GOT A SHOT IN THE ARM FROM SATELLITE
TV BUT THEN LOST ITS WAY. BUT ROCK ‘N’
ROLL NEVER DIED

i want my MTV

f
Tuning in: Parikrama
has been performing
regularly at the
Independence Rock
concerts in Mumbai.

For India’s non-Bollywood music
scene, the early 1990s were little
more than an extension of the
closing notes of the 1980s. The
new decade may have promised a
freshness of purpose and offered
a vestige of hope for the straggling
rock and pop movement (if one
could accord it any motion at all),
but the truth was, not much was
really happening. Sure, there were
the usual college gigs, occasional
rock festivals and the like—but in
terms of any serious growth in the
prospects of existing bands,
popular or less known, and
incentive for aspiring bands and
solo artistes, it was pretty bleak.
Then a bolt shot through the
ether. The ray of light for makers
and lovers of sounds not created
by Bappi Lahiri, Anu Malik and
their kitschy kin arrived in the
form of Star TV’s expansive
satellite footprint. The channel’s
singular incursion was closely
followed by its bouquet of
affiliates. But the affiliate that
mattered most to those indie
music makers and lovers was, of
course, MTV. First glance wasn’t
half bad either (except perhaps
the short-lived Yo! MTV Raps).
Although a considerable chunk of
airtime was given to sugar-loaded
Cantopop ballads emerging from
Taiwan and Hong Kong, and
big-maned grunge outfits from
Indonesia and Malaysia, the bulk
of the channel’s programming
featured bands we sought and
loved: Van Halen, Pearl Jam,
Counting Crows, REM, Def
Leppard. And some we didn’t:
Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, MC
Hammer (okay I admit it,
You Can’t Touch This was
cool, billowing harem pants
notwithstanding).

But the real shot in the arm
came when MTV trained its sights
on India as not just a mass
market to squeeze, but a creative
catchment area to draw from.
And the reservoir was itching to
blow its banks. My band, Rock
Machine, was fortunate to feature
as India’s first act to hit the
hallowed portal. After our video
Top of the Rock first aired, a flood
ensued. Everyone scrambled to
get a video together. Beleaguered
bands tried to scrape together
pennies, pretty solo singers
sought out benefactors, the less
attractive ones tried to convince
reluctant record companies to
insert music video clauses into
their contracts.
We were luckier than a
lot—and maybe a little smarter
than a few. Rather than heading
down the futile road of record
label sponsorship, we opted for
corporate sponsorship instead.
We proposed tie-ups that went
off-screen. The sponsor would
fund our music video; we, in turn,
would offer exposure to the
sponsor through alternative
avenues: interviews with the
media, their logo on our
merchandise, doing a free concert
(or two), displaying banners at
our gigs featuring said sponsor’s
logo, maybe even producing a
jingle or two on the house. But
there was one thing that we were
firm about: no product placement
in the video. It helped that MTV’s
broadcast policy disallowed
it—and they were unflinching.
This exciting new medium
attracted film-makers eager to go
beyond the 30-second
commercials they were
producing and explore the open
canvas of interpretive art via

4-minute music videos, no holds
barred. We were lucky to be able
to ally with some brilliant
directors whose vision made an
indelible imprint on the
airwaves. India was now very
much on the map as a fount of
sonic and visual talent.
The “scene” had officially
begun. We finally had a credible
platform for non-Bollywood
music. The medium crossed
languages, inevitably.
To begin with there were the
English-language acts: the socially
conscious and always entertaining
Remo Fernandes, feisty Mumbai
gal Jasmine Bharucha, Bangalore
metalheads Millennium and
Delhi band Parikrama, to name a
few. Mumbai’s Colourblind came
and went in a blink but left a
significant mark in their slickly
produced, self-titled album. The
Hindi movement was more
prolific, however—there was
money in the national language.
Suneeta Rao had a bunch of
videos, most notably the evocative
Pari. Alisha Chinai channelled
Biddu’s cheesed-up
compositions, Daler Mehndi
convinced south Indians to go
Punjabi, Baba Sehgal melded
gibberish with some form of rap
and Raageshwari liberally flashed
her pearly whites while singing a
song that her daddy wrote for a
video that her bhaiya directed.
Lucky Ali permeated the airwaves
with some of the most refreshing
songs and sounds we’d heard in
a long time. And Colonial
Cousins mashed classical idiom
with pop sensibilities delivered in
easy morsels.
Channel V, meanwhile, had
edged its way into the music
broadcast spectrum and was

giving the unseated-andrelaunched American music
television giant a run for its
pixels. By this time, however,
broadcasting principles had
suffered something of a setback.
Raageshwari’s video seemed
like a barely veiled commercial
for a cola behemoth. Just a few
years earlier both music
channels would have sent the
beta videotape right back to
the sender. Not so any more.
They seemed quite comfortable
with the cola company’s
ubiquitous red-and-white logo
screaming out from behind the
prancing Raageshwari.
That, right there, heralded a
change in philosophy.
The second half of the 1990s
saw the beginning of the end of
music TV as we had briefly
known it. Hindi pop soon saw its
demise along with the record
companies that tried to inflict
upon people a slew of half-baked
semi-talents.
But rock ‘n’ roll never dies.
The decade continued to see
more and more indie music
emerge from bedrooms and
hostels. Whether boasting a video
or not, bands were playing across
the country. Kerala’s 13AD—with
the virtuosic Eloy on guitar—
crossed paths with my band (now
called Indus Creed, renamed
around the time we released our
video Pretty Child) in different
parts of the country more than a
few times. Kolkata’s Shiva worked
their way through the cover band
circuit of the east and north-east.
Other Kolkata bands, such as
New Horizon and Krosswindz,
saw line-ups alter and
morph…but they plodded on.
Some artistes found their way

to Bollywood. Remo’s voice was
first imprinted on A.R. Rahman’s
Humma Humma to great success.
He managed to milk that
opportunity without subverting
his own independence, a rare feat
to achieve when the lure of lucre
is so high. Other indie music
aspirants crossed the fence, totally
and without remorse: KK took his
soaring voice and used it well in
Bollywood, briefly interjecting his
flourishing career with a couple of
non-filmi pop albums. Mohit
Chauhan, a current Bollywood
fave, found his way to playback
after the end of Silk Route, the
Hindi folk-rock act he sang for.
Vishal Dadlani, of the Bollywood
power-pair Vishal-Shekhar, spent
his early music years as the
founder and frontman of
Pentagram, the industrial-rock
band that was born in the ashes
of the decade.
Pentagram still exists, Remo
still plays, we relaunched Indus
Creed last year after a 12-year
hiatus, and there is frequent
talk of Lucky Ali returning with
new material.
The 1990s were a period of
unceasing change, much of it
turbulent. It saw the rapid rise of
a wildly fertile scene, and its
equally quick decline. But the
milestones set then still poke their
heads above the potholed path.
Independent, non-Bollywood
music is seeing an unprecedented
fecundity these days. Whether
that’s despite or because of the
1990s will remain moot.
Uday Benegal is a musician and
writer, and the frontman of the
band Indus Creed.
Write to lounge@livemint.com
AKSHAYRAJ UCHIL